For Easier Baked Ziti, Soak, Don't Boil Your Pasta | The Food Lab

Nys Aqyla    9/10/2022    Baked Pasta , Italian-American   

Here's another exclusive excerpt from my book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, which is currently a New York Times bestseller. OH!

I hope you enjoyed the excerpt (and macaroni and cheese!), which comes from the chapter on ketchup, pasta, and pasta science.

Grilled Ziti is the dish I make at the annual ski retreat that my friends and I take to New England every year. There are few baked goods that are easier to make but give such amazing results, especially when it's snowing outside and you have a whole compartment of friends to feed.

Soak, do not boil

  Here's something I've always wondered: when cooking pasta, such as lasagna or ziti in the oven, why do you always cook the pasta first? Aren't you asking for trouble by cooking once, then putting in the pot and cooking again? Well, there's the first obvious part of the answer to that question: pasta needs to absorb water during cooking - a lot of water, about 80% of its own weight when whole. So, add raw pasta directly to a baked pasta dish, and it will be deliciously tender - it will also draw all the moisture out of the sauce, leaving it dry or spoiled.

Here's the problem: dry pasta is made from flour, water and, on rare occasions, eggs. It's basically made up of starch and protein, and not much else. The starch molecules are clumped into large particles that look like small water balloons. When heated in a humid environment, they continue to absorb more and more water, swell and become soft.

During this time, the proteins in the noodles begin to denature, giving more structure to the noodles (much more obvious when cooking fresh, soft egg noodles). When the stars are aligned, you can pull the pasta out of the water only if the proteins have enough structure to keep the noodles firm and supple and the starch is barely softened to perfection - soft but mouth-watering - called al dente. But who can say that these two stages, water absorption and protein denaturation, must occur at the same time? H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa of the excellent blog Ideas in Food asked themselves this question and they found this: you don't have to do both processes at the same time. In fact, if you leave raw pasta in warm water long enough, it will absorb as much water as boiled pasta.

Here's what they had to say about it: "The drained [soaked] noodles retain their shape, and since the starch hasn't been activated, they don't stick together and can be held without adding oil." . Once we added the noodles to the brine, we cooked al dente pasta in just 60 seconds.” Really enjoyable.

To try it myself, I put some pasta in a bowl of hot tap water and let it sit, taking out a piece every 5 minutes to measure how much water it absorbed. After about 30 minutes, it has absorbed as much water as a piece of hard-boiled pasta, while remaining completely raw!

While the ability to cook your own pre-soaked pasta in just 60 seconds isn't all that exciting for a home cook (all it does is convert an 8-minute cooking process into a 30-plus 1-minute soak process). - hardly once - save), it is a very interesting application for restaurant chefs who can prepare soaked pasta to cook in a short time.

But what it means for a home cook is this: whenever you're going to cook pasta in a pot, you don't have to cook it first. All you have to do is soak the sauce while making the sauce, then combine the two and cook. Since the pasta is already hydrated, it won't lose your sauce, and the heat from the oven is more than enough to cook it while the pie is stewing. If you eat them side by side, you won't be able to tell the difference between pre-cooked pasta and dipping pasta. Think what that means for lasagna! I know at least six different common dental procedures that I would rather do than cook lasagna.

Keep the sauce simple

Red sauce is basically one of five Italian cooking “mother sauces” that I identify in my book (the others are garlic and oil, ragú, cream, and pesto). It is a necessary staple in any Western chef's pantry. Countless Italian-American restaurants rely on this sauce.

Marcella Hazan's ketchup recipe may offer the best culinary value for money you'll ever see. It's so simple, it doesn't even need a full recipe - just boil a 28-ounce can of whole-grain tomatoes with 5 tablespoons of unsalted butter and half an onion, mash the tomatoes against the side of the pan with a spoon - but your taste. rich, fresh and perfectly balanced. It's the butter that makes the difference. Unlike olive oil, butter contains natural emulsifiers that help keep the sauce creamy and nice. And the sweetness from the milk works in tandem with the sweetness of the onion while rounding out the harsher acidic notes of the tomato.

From where Marcella left off, it's not a far cry from the classic American-Italian marinara sauce, a ketchup flavored with garlic, oregano, and olive oil. Butter is always needed to smooth out the rough edges of the tomatoes, but here I want to replace half with extra virgin olive oil to add more complexity to the mixture. I make it in four batches and store it in sealed Ball jars. Bottle while hot in a sterile jar, seal tightly, and allow sauce to cool to room temperature before placing in the refrigerator. It will keep in the refrigerator for at least a month, ready to be reheated and served or incorporated into another recipe.

Now that we know how to make the basic marinara sauce and know how to soak the sauce more easily than boiling pasta for a baked casserole, it's just a short hop away and you can switch to the classic grilled ziti. The noodles are mixed with a pink mixture of ketchup, cream, and ricotta cheese, with a few eggs thrown in to create a casserole structure during cooking. I also love mixing mozzarella cubes with pasta to form supple, stretchy bags. I finished it all off with some marinara, extra mozzarella balls, and grating parmesan.

Get The Recipe

• The Food Lab's No-Boil Baked Ziti Recipe