Pasta mixed through sauce, with cheese on top, baked until it bubbles and browns at the edges. It’s a restaurant classic (baked ziti, pasta al forno, mac and cheese), and at home it’s what leftover pasta wants to be. The bake turns a bowl of yesterday’s spaghetti into something with a crust.
Picks
Saucy and cheesy, with a browned, chewy top.
- The starch: Short or cut pasta (macaroni, penne, ziti, or leftover spaghetti), mixed through
- The filling: Whatever’s in the sauce: meat, vegetables, or nothing
- The sauce: Tomato or meat sauce, or a cheese sauce, made loose
- The top and the bake: Grated cheese, or buttered crumbs; bake until bubbling
Where it comes from
Baked ziti is a pasta al forno (a baked pasta casserole) from Italian-American cooking: ziti with béchamel and ragù, topped with cheese (Wikipedia). Baked pasta in Italy goes back much further, to the Renaissance, as a cheaper version of a meat pie (Wikipedia).
In North America, baked pasta came back in the 1960s through pizza restaurants. Pizzerias had spread quickly after the war (Wikipedia), and the chains followed: Pizza Hut in 1958, Little Caesars in 1959, and Domino’s in 1960. Every one of those restaurants had a big deck oven running hot all day, and the same mozzarella, tomato sauce, and meat sauce as the pizzas. Baked pasta was the easy way to add to the menu. Cook the ziti or penne ahead, and when an order comes in, layer it into a tin with sauce and a heavy blanket of cheese and slide it in beside the pies. The oven’s dry heat browns the cheese at the edges and thickens the sauce faster than a home oven can.
It suited the time, too. The 1960s were the casserole boom, and a dish of baked ziti was a casserole that happened to be Italian: easier to eat than a plate of long spaghetti, and easy to split across a family booth. It also travelled. Boiled pasta goes soft and cold on the way home, but a baked pasta under a layer of melted cheese holds its heat, which made it a good add-on to a takeout pizza.
By the 1970s, a pizza restaurant was also a pasta house. Hamilton’s Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House opened in 1970 serving pizza, spaghetti, and lasagna, and grew to 120 restaurants across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Wikipedia). The baked pasta on a pizza chain’s menu today comes from that formula.
Why these picks
- Loose sauce. The pasta drinks it in the oven. Leftover pasta has already drunk most of its own, so add more.
- Small pasta, not sheets. Short shapes and cut-up long pasta mix with the sauce, so every spoonful has both. Sheets are laid in layers, and that’s lasagne.
- Pasta short of done. Fresh-cooked pasta goes in a minute or two before al denteAl denteCooked until tender but still firm at the centre, with a little bite: Italian for “to the tooth”.; it finishes in the bake.
How it fails
- Dry and stiff: not enough sauce, especially with leftover pasta.
- Mushy: the pasta was fully cooked before it baked.
Variations
- Mac and cheese: a cheese sauce in place of the tomato (Baked mac & cheese).
- Johnny Marzetti: macaroni with ground beef and tomato sauce, the Ohio cafeteria casserole.
- Baked ziti: ragù and a little béchamel, with mozzarella on top.