The Classic Shape To Avoid For Better Pasta Bakes

Pasta bakes are a classic Italian-American comfort meal and are usually easy to prepare. Tomato or meat sauce is mixed with pasta, covered with cheese, and baked to saucy, cheesy, crispy perfection for a go-to weeknight dinner. The crowd-pleasing and hands-off casserole dish is usually synonymous with the ziti shape. In fact, ziti probably gets used more in baked pasta than in any other dish. But we're here to break some news to you: Ziti isn't the best option to use in pasta bakes, and it all boils down to the nature of the shape.

The tubular pasta is smooth on all sides and has a relatively narrow center. Because the shape has such even sides, there's nothing for the pasta sauce to stick to. This leads to a forked bite that drips sauce back onto the plate; and, even worse, sauceless noodles going into your mouth. For better pasta bakes, choose a sturdy, tubular pasta with ridges on the outside to trap sauce and cheese. Rigatoni fits the bill perfectly, but even penne rigate or mid-sized shells would serve as better sauce vehicles than ziti.

Now that we've established that ziti isn't an ideal shape for baked pasta, let's talk about the other components — starting with the sauce. You can't go wrong with homemade tomato sauce, but you should know that jarred sauce can actually be best for baked pasta, if not for just the time saved by using it. Homemade sauce is important in simple pasta dishes because of the complexity of flavors achieved when you put love and time into simmering a sauce on the stove. In addition, baked pasta gets, well, baked, so your jarred sauce will absorb the flavors of the other elements in the oven, and your dish will have beautiful layers of flavor even with this shortcut.

Cheese also plays an important role in baked pasta, and it's not just through its satisfying flavor. In the oven, the pasta finishes cooking, and the cheese melts into the sauce to create a creamy emulsion that locks everything together. With the right ridged noodle, as we touched on, the cheese and sauce mixture seals around the pasta as it cooks. At the very end, use your broiler to achieve a golden crust on your baked pasta to ensure that your dish is a hit.