A few people have asked for it so I thought I would toss in a quick post here with the full ziti recipe for future reference. The recipe will fill to about overflowing a 9×13 pan.
This is for the normal version with ground beef in it. After the recipe I will leave a bunch of notes toward substitutions I have tested etc.
Ingredients:
2 lbs ground beef
1 15oz can tomato sauce
1 8oz can tomato sauce
1 15oz can diced tomatoes
16oz shredded cheese (Italian blend)
32oz ricotta cheese
16oz ziti
Basil, oregano, thyme, salt, pepper, parsley, cayenne powder, red pepper flakes, hot sauce, garlic
Order of operations:
Fill your eventual pasta boiling pot with water and add a bunch of salt to it (I also like to add a good splash of olive oil to the water as it prevents it from foaming over). Heat it once near boiling, no pasta in it, and then let it sit, covered, while you do everything else.
Take 1 pound of the ground beef. Toss it in a bowl with some basil, oregano, salt, pepper, and parsley. Mix it all up and then form meatballs with it. Each meatball should be roughly the size of the first joint of your thumb, or thereabout. Make some smaller, some bigger, whatever, it isn’t exact science and variety is the spice of life.
Toss the meatballs in a large pan and fry them up. Get them about 80% done then add the other pound of ground beef to the pan, along with some garlic. (I will always say “some garlic” because you do you on that, I want to use tons, but hey) Break up the beef and let it cook while the meatballs continue to finish in the same pan. They will finish at about the same time.
If you used 80% or higher lean beef, leave the grease, do not drain it. If you used anything lower than 80% ground beef, drain some to most of the grease. But we’re gonna want some for flavor, and will be making the sauce in this same pan.
Add all the cans of tomato (sauces and diced) to the pan and lower the heat down to really low, like simmer, like as low as it can go and still be on. Spice it up. Add a bit more salt than you think, a bit more pepper and then more garlic. Now stop and think about things. I balance it the rest like this:
I start with the basil. Add enough to coat the top of the sauce, all of it, with a nice (very thin) coating of basil. Then add a dash or two more. Add about ¾ of that in oregano, and about half as much thyme and parsley as you did oregano.
Add about four shakes of cayenne pepper just for taste, and three to six splashes of your hot sauce of choice depending on how much heat you want (for whatever it’s worth I’ve tried a bunch in this and Cholula works best overall for me in this recipe adding some nice complementary flavors, but straight tabasco will also work) then add three to five shakes of red pepper flakes remembering that they will blossom over time so the heat will sneak if you aren’t careful. Try it and dial it in over time.
Stir this all, leaving it on that low simmer, and cover. Let it continue to come together for an absolute minimum of two hours. I try to aim for four. You don’t want the sauce to boil down much. You will want to go and stir it and check in on it to make sure it isn’t boiling or anything, every half hour.
Once you’ve decided your sauce is done, or are running out of time, or you’re getting too hungry, start boiling your pasta water. Once it reaches a boil dump in the pasta. Once the pasta is in, and stirred grab the ricotta.
This is also when you will want to start preheating your oven to 350F.
Add about 16 oz of the ricotta directly to the sauce. Stir it in, and let it color the whole sauce a nice orangish color. When you’re not stirring the sauce to blend the ricotta in, you’re stirring the pasta so it doesn’t stick. You are a stir god. You got this.
Important note: Cook the pasta to about 90% of where you normally like it. It will continue to cook and be in liquids a while yet so don’t let it get all the way to perfection, just close.
Once the pasta is done, strain it and then add it directly to the sauce, assuming your pan can handle it. If not, add the pasta back to the empty pasta pot and add the sauce to that. Either way you need to now fold the sauce and pasta together and mix (gently, if you’re rough you’ll shred your pasta)
Add all of that to your 9x13pan and pat it even and flat. Spread the remaining 16oz of ricotta over things. I like to use a dollop method with a bit of spread so the ricotta isn’t everywhere, but is in fun pockets throughout. You’ll find your perfect application pattern, too.
Cover the whole thing in the shredded cheese. All of it. Yes it feels like “too much” cheese at some point but that’s a coward’s way of thinking.
Put the whole thing into the oven, uncovered, for roughly 20 minutes, or until the cheese on top is totally melted. Bonus points for letting it brown some.
Take it out of the oven and it is stand for five to ten minutes.
You now have a baked ziti.
Some notes and reasonings:
Everything in the above recipe is, actually, an on purpose choice. I mean sure if you want to dice and blanche a tomato yourself it might seem like it would be better. If you grated some mozzarella, provolone and parmesan fresh wouldn’t it taste better than a bag of shredded “blend” cheese?
On the one hand – yes 100%
On the other hand you need to understand I spend years tweaking and making this recipe work to recreate a very specific type of baked ziti. That NY tiny pizza place baked ziti that was always amazing but seemed like “is this really something they even do?” and I found it closer to true if I used the canned tomatoes and pre-shredded cheese. Which is kinda funny since they used fresh cheese.
So that was my specific goal. You go nuts and change up whatever you want!
To that end, I will just as often make this with diced hot Italian sausage instead of meatballs. Or fried up loose sausage meat instead of the loose ground beef. Works really well.
If you want zero meat, while you could just drop it out, you will want to add something to replace the general bulk and texture. Trust me. I find various cubed peppers work well. As will zucchini. Any vegetable that works in a tomato sauce, of course, will work here. The reason I don’t add them otherwise is, well, see above for what I was doing specifically, but also if you add too much other bulk, you need to also add more raw tomato sauce then re-spice and… this become a totally different recipe if you use both meat and all the veg.
But it would be a good recipe.
Some of you may be yelling I did not add sugar to the tomato sauce. And you’re kind of right, you want to cut the acid some. The ricotta does that, which is why I don’t add sugar. That’s all.
Speaking of the ricotta in the sauce – that’s the big key here for this dish, honestly. It thickens, sweetens, and makes the sauce sticky so it clings to the pasta, and the meatballs.
Like all good things – this is even better reheated the next day. And part of that is the ricotta in the sauce, again.
As for the meatballs, I often do like to make the meatballs even better by mixing in an egg and some breadcrumbs. It makes them tiny meatloaf meatballs. I have also, of course used both pounds of meat to make four big half meatballs that way, used no meat in the sauce at all, and baked the meatballs (350 for about an hour: you shape them in halves, flat side down, covered, and sitting in a bit of tomato sauce) and then went full veg with the sauce since the meat wasn’t part of it.
There are no wrong answers here. Cook it so you love it, and the people you are feeding love it. Then find some variations, too. That’s all that matters. All of the above is just what I do, these days, for the most part. But food, and especially cooking for others, is an act of love. So make it your own and make it an expression of you, and share the love with your close ones.
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