How To Make Gourmet Restaurant Quality Baked Ziti

Today we are making one of my all time favorite pasta bakes… Baked Ziti! I am showing you guys all of my secret ingredients in this one! Let’s #makeithappen

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If you’re in the mood for comfort food and find yourself with a pasta craving, then I’ve got just the recipe for you. Today, we’re making baked ziti. This recipe has layers of pasta, a rich meat sauce, a creamy cheese mixture, and plenty of secret ingredients. All baked to golden perfection. This is everything you love about lasagna, but way easier. Meet me in the kitchen. Let’s make it happen. All right, people. Baked ziti is an absolute classic. It also happens to be one of my all-time favorite pastas. Again, you kind of get like the lasagna vibe without all the extra leg work. We’re going to prep our veggies. Real simple ingredients today. We got onion, we got fresh garlic, we got fresh basil. I love basil. If you can find some fresh oregano, that’s a nice touch as well. The dried stuff works. That’s what we’ll be using today. And I’ll show you how to rehydrate that in the oil in just a moment. We’re going to go ahead and peel our onion. Leave the root intact, making it easier to dice. Going to dice up our garlic. Give a rough chop to the basil. All right, guys. Next up, we have secret ingredient number one. We’re going to mix a little boren cheese in with our ricotta cheese mixture. One whole block. This is about 5.2 oz, I think it says. And then we have whole milk ricotta. About a pound, 15 to 16 ounces of that. Going to mix that together. In my opinion, a lot of the store-bought ricotta is, you know, lacks flavor and depth. So, we’re going to mix in a little boren cheese to add a little complexity to the cheese mixture. Super delicious. This is great with a shakuderie board. It’s good in a number of things and I put a lot of people on the internet on to boards and cheese. So, we’re going to mix this together. One of the things that I love about baked ziti is how well it reheats. It travels well and it freezes well. You can make one big dish like we’re making today, vacuum seal it in individual portions and put it in the freezer for months and anytime you want some big ziti, you can just defrost it, heat it up and boom, you got yourself a nice dinner. So, we’re going to mix this together. Then, we’re going to go in with a little bit of garlic. And then we’ll start to add our seasonings. You want to first mix the ricotta and the bors in together to make sure that it’s all unified before you get to adding everything else. All right. So, we’re going to add in 1 tbsp of garlic, a tablespoon of dried oregano or fresh if you have it. Dried works nicely for this recipe. A little bit of red pepper flakes. Optional ingredients. Going to add a little bit of heat, but not a lot. about a teaspoon or so of those. You can leave those out if you want. And then my allpurpose seasoning or just a little salt and pepper, whatever floats your boat, but this AP seasoning covers all your bases. Got salt, pepper, garlic, onion powder, things like that. Quick reminder, guys, you can find this recipe and all of my recipes for free at mritappen.com. In with about a/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese and then 1/4 cup of diced parsley. All right, guys. Couple very important tips. Number one, heavily salt your pasta water. That little pinch of salt I see y’all adding on the internet is not enough. Add enough until it tastes like the ocean. You want it to be heavily salted. That way, the flavor gets into the pasta. It’s your best opportunity to season your pasta. Next, stop adding olive oil to your pasta water. It’s not doing anything. Just add the pasta to boiling water. Stir it so it doesn’t stick. You’re good to go. If you want to add some oil to it after the fact, then that’s fine. But oil and water don’t mix. The oil is just going to float at the top of the pasta water, effectively wasting your oil. Now, we’re going to move on to our meat sauce. We’re going in with some oil bottom of the skillet. I’m using ground beef and mild Italian sausage today. So, we’re going in with the mild Italian sausage. If you don’t eat pork, no big deal. You can just add the um all beef, turkey, whatever protein you like. And we’re going to add the ground beef at the same time. We’re going to try to make sure we make good surface area contact with the bottom of the Dutch oven or your skillet. That way, we develop some crust. The crust is going to add flavor, texture, and color, which is important. All right, so once the meat is browned beautifully on all sides, we’re going to go ahead and add in our onion and our fresh garlic. Immediately, the aroma is going to fill the room. People from upstairs are going to come downstairs and ask what time dinner is going to be ready. Going to give it a mix. We’re going to start to season this. One thing I should call out is we’re calling this recipe baked ziti, but we’re using large rietoni noodles because in my opinion, those are, you know, the superior noodle. You can get a little bit more sauce inside the noodle. I like to use rietoni for my baked z. So, technically, this might be baked rietoni, but in the style of baked zones as well. We’re going to add AP seasoning. We’re going to add some oregano. We’re going to add some red pepper flakes. Maybe a pinch of chicken buon just to elevate the flavor a little bit. Tomato paste. You can delaze with dry red wine if you want to or just a little beef broth. Couple tablespoons of good quality tomato paste. Give that a mix. All right, guys. So after you add either the red wine or the beeftock like we use today, you want to give it some time over high heat to allow it to really reduce. It’s going to concentrate the flavors a lot. At this point, now that we’ve reduced that, we’re going to add in a little bit of chicken buon powder. This is kind of just a little flavor cheat coat. It’s got some MSG. If you eat out at restaurants, this stuff’s in pretty much everything. Um, we’re also going to throw in some crushed tomatoes and then our tomato sauce. We’re going to reduce the heat a little bit now because we don’t want it to be a rapid boil. We just want it to be a simmer at this point. And then we’re going to taste as we go. Adjust the flavor to your preference as always. And just let this simmer 30 minutes, maybe an hour if you have the time. The longer the better. You can add a pinch of sugar to balance the acidity of the tomatoes. You can drain some of that fat if you want to, but I actually kind of like that. So, it’s going to add a little good mouth feel to your sauce, and it’s going to add some flavor as well. Going to let that simmer for at least 30 minutes right now. And then I’m going to come back and taste it. Once the flavors have time to kind of come together, then I’ll make the adjustments that that are needed at that point. Now, my friends, it’s time to build your ziti. We got our oven preheated to 350°. We got a light layer of pasta sauce down at the bottom. We got our bors in and ricotta mixture. We got some delicious looking ziti or I guess rietoni noodles that’s coated in that sauce. We’re going down with that first layer of pasta. And then we’re going to top it with that uh borsen and ricotta mixture followed by a layer of mozzarella. And then do that one more time. Repeat that, you know, layer situation kind of like you’re building a lasagna. And then top it with mozzarella cheese. Pop it in the oven about 30 minutes and you’re good to go. All right, people. There you have it. Baked ziti. It doesn’t get much better than this. This is perfect for meal prep. Again, you can freeze it, reheat it later. If you got a friend that is injured or just had a baby, you can make this and drop it off at their house. They can eat on it for a couple days. You’ll be a saint. Trust me, this one is really good. We’re going to dig in for a taste test here. Before we do that, please take a quick second, subscribe to the channel. Make sure you hit that bell to enable notifications as well. Here we go. Moment of truth. Oh my god. That’s good. It’s like lasagna but without all the fuss. If you want this recipe and any recipe from this channel, visit mrmakeappen.com. Y got to try that. Damn. Mhm. It’s the one and not the two. It’s like everything.