Baked Ziti with Meatballs

For Christmas Dinner we have a Baked Ziti with Meatballs on Dave’s Cooking Show coming to the end of the Christmas Spectacular

[Applause] [Applause] [Applause] Welcome to Dave’s cooking show and it is time for Christmas dinner we’re going to do baked zitis and meatballs for this so to a bowl I have a half a pound of ground beef and a half a pound of ground pork uh the ground beef is standard 8020

Chuck to that I’ve already added a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper and then we’re going to add two large eggs remember best way to crack eggs is do it on a flat surface and then I’m going to add a/4 cup of flat leaf parsley that I or

Italian parsley as it’s also known same plant flat leaf Italian doesn’t matter it’s just a name uh anyway /4 cup of that that I’ve uh chopped up then you’re going to want to add a half a cup of Italian breadcrumbs then you want a half a cup

Of Parmesan cheese that I pulverized in my food processor and then you want to add three cloves of minced garlic then you just want to find the little old paddle attachment and basically drop this down into the mix lock it in and hit the mix speed which is the slowest setting and

Give everything a couple of minutes to mix together you can also do this by hand if you wish but then you’re going to want to roll this meat mix into 1 5 O balls that’s an ounce and a half and then you’re just going to want to roll them around make them into

Perfectly little round balls of meaty goodness I’ll show them when they’re done and as you can see that’s what we’re going for if you want to make the Meatballs 2 oz you’ll have less this made about 17 of them if you want to go a little smaller feel free you’ll just have more

Balls and nothing’s better than more balls all right let’s go on to the next step now you could put the balls into a 375° oven right now but I don’t like to do that I like to se them first so with some olive oil that’s been ripping

Hot um or about as hot as olive oil can get sear basically all these little balls about 30 seconds a minute on each side um like I said you should be preheating the oven up to 375° again there’s it’s one of those kind of Up For Debate things you do what

You like but um me I always like to sear meatballs before I put them in the oven and you want to cook these till of course they are 165 okay as you can see here we’re turning these over getting them seared and everything so they’re all nice and

Wonderful and all right then like I said we’re going to sear them all and then pop them in the oven to uh cook until they’re 165 okay as you can see I’ve got my uh red wine de glaze kind of going here and now it’s time to work on the tomato

Sauce so basically I took two cans of sand Marzano tomatoes and puree them in my blender I again I’m really spoiled this is the only thing about food and when you kind of get into it you can’t have that quick ass spaghetti and meatballs anymore oh no no no no you can’t have

You know that Frozen crap and Jarred sauce no it’s got to you got to make it yourself and you’ve got to use San Marzano tomatoes because not because the the off you know the Hunts brand tastes like dog tastes like watery tomato piss and I want the good

so basically uh the red wine uh delays and uh the S orano tomatoes and let these kind of mix together for you know a couple of minutes okay as you can see here uh I’ve kind of let that sauce uh simmer by the way um I’m not sure if it didn’t get

Lost but four cloves of garlic into this 1/4 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes and salt and pepper to taste and again after after I gave it about 15 minutes I added the meatballs back in and now we’re going to begin the long slow simmering process of uh marrying the two basically

You want these meatballs trust me if the oven didn’t finish them off cooking this will so again I’d say I had these in here for 45 minutes but it’s one of those things the longer the better unfortunately I was getting a little Punchy while I was filming this

What I did there was I added a pound of ricotta cheese you know standard 16 oz container you can find it in any deli department to our sauce mixed it around now it’s in the process of finishing the Melt also you should be getting a pot of

Water on the boil to bake uh to uh cook the Ziti um and again whatever whatever it says on the package take a minute off the minimum amount of time given on the package and again this is going to simmer for probably another 20 or so minutes cuz I

Always start my pasta water out cold I don’t know why it’s just the way I’ve always done that I’m sure it has nothing to do with taste or anything but all right let’s get ready to make a ziti okay we got a great big bowl

Out and uh the ZD is done it’s just uh been drained into a colander and we’re going to add it to this here bowl like I said this is why you want to take that extra minute off cuz right now that last minute is being

Cooked right now if you were to go to the manager’s minimum time right now your pasta would be an overcooked pile of all right let’s get the sauce off of the uh stove and now it’s time to add the uh pasta sauce to the noodles and give that

A stir to make sure everything is mixed together all nice um and then you want to be preheating the oven to roughly what the devil did it say in my notes here I’d say about 375 400 I think that’s what I had my mine on

So yeah give this a good mix around and uh yeah preheat the oven to 400° something like that is what we’re looking for okay now a standard 9×13 baking dish would work but I decided to get my uh lasagna pan out here and I basically want to dump all the

Uh baked zii the zii and meatballs whatever uh into this and you kind of want to move everything around make sure everything’s evenly distributed make sure it’s a as level as possible because after you do that we’re going to add one lound of mozzarella cheese now this is a whole milk

Mozzarella cheese and I do recommend using whole milk get the good the good old cuz that part skim stuff just can’t quite cut it so there’s a shredded H milk uh mozzarella and one pound of it will go on top then we’re going to pop this uh

Ziti into our oven for approximately 20 to 25 minutes if you want the cheese a little crispier when the 25 to 20 minutes are up take it out crank on the broiler and pop it back in for another minute um uh I’ll back in for another minute to

Kind of crisp up the cheese a little bit but be careful with a broiler okay and after 20 minutes or so that’s what we’re looking at and that that is baked ziti a perfect addition for a Christmas Day dinner that everyone will love and we’ll finally shut up Tiny

Tim yeah yeah yeah I know you walk with a crunch get over yourself