The Best and Easiest Baked Pasta You'll Ever Have

Today , we're gonna make sausage , baked pasta .

This is a great one , really easy .

Let's get to prepping all those ingredients right now .

All right guys , we're gonna go over all those ingredients .

I have white wine .

We're gonna need a half a cup for the sauce mozzarella .

I grated £1 of Calabro brand .

Uh use any brand you like this from Whole Foods .

Whole Foods sells Calabro instead of uh Polio or uh Galvani Poo and Galvani are gonna be the most common brands that you're gonna come across tomatoes .

These are crushed tomatoes .

No , today time to start changing it up with the brands and these were on sale .

So these are good .

These are good tomatoes here's and you know , you can use any type of pasta you want to whatever .

It's also Calabro Regatta .

That's £1 of it .

I took , I have £1.5 of Mild Italian sausage that's from Whole Foods as well .

It's like a , just a mess the way they package that they like in a back seal pack .

So it's gonna be a little harder to get it crumbly versus like if you buy it from like a regular pork store .

You go to a regular pork store .

It'll be much uh or broken apart .

Pecorino , Romano .

We have a half cup , one medium onion diced and about four cloves of garlic .

We're using 2 28 ounce cans of tomatoes .

So you're gonna need a larger pan here .

You don't have to use a stainless pan like I'm using here .

You could definitely use a non stick like this tea , which would be fine .

Since I am using a stainless pan , you're gonna heat it up for a couple of minutes before you put any oil down or anything .

I'm heating it up on about a level four out of 10 .

I gonna put in a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and the onion .

Let this go for a couple of minutes and then we will get our sausage in .

We're not going to put the garlic in , we'll put the garlic in after it'll be fine .

The onions have gone for a couple of minutes , maybe three minutes .

You can see that they're lightly translucent .

Now , since this sausage is hard to break up , we're going to try to do it a little different today , but it doesn't really matter because this is a sauce more that we're making and I'm just going to spread it out a little bit .

I took it out of the fridge for about an hour thinking that would make it a little easier to handle .

But that doesn't really do much .

Had a bunch of people in the pasta Norcia .

That's my viral video .

Guys .

That one has almost a million views and I only published it like maybe a month ago , two months ago .

It's pretty recent .

A lot of people were saying to use one of these .

This is a tool that you never use , that's in your drawer , in your kitchen drawer and all the tools that I don't use .

I took out of my kitchen drawer .

So I keep them in basically like a plastic container because my feeling is I want to have my drawers to be relatively empty .

So I can grab something quickly and not , not be rummaging around for it .

I went and got this one in that container for today .

It's called the Paradox of Choice .

You got too much stuff that's like when you go to a diner and that's a Long Island thing , you know , in the city .

Not really though more Long Island , there will be just hundreds of things on the menu .

It's like you can't decide and turn that over and I'll try to break it up .

I had my heat about four out of 10 .

You can maybe make it a little bit higher if you want .

It's gonna take about 10 minutes .

Eight minutes .

You don't have to cook the sausage all the way because we're going to put the tomatoes in and let it keep simmering .

All right .

So we still have some raw pieces in here .

You can see , um , the sausage is almost gone though .

It's gonna keep breaking it up with my potato masher .

The best I can and my wooden spoon , I'm gonna make a little bit of room here doing the same thing that I did in the Norna , gonna take the garlic and put that in there .

The only reason I didn't do the garlic right from the get go .

You don't want to risk burning it though .

You'd probably be all right .

And then we'll get some color on that garlic .

Let it go for a couple of minutes .

Sausage isn't done yet .

So we're good timing wise .

Yeah .

You see how it's nice .

That oil from the sausage flavoring , it's getting a little color now the garlic , lots of flavor there .

This is an odd blend .

This whole foods mild sausage .

It doesn't taste anything like any sausage that you would get locally from any Italian pork store .

It's a nice change .

It's got , it's got good flavor .

Now you can see the garlic is looking good and let it keep going a little bit .

And then if you want hot red pepper , add it .

Now I'm gonna put in about quarter teaspoon to a half .

If you want it spicier , you could use some Calabrian chili paste .

If you have that , bring that all together , try to break it up as best you can and then turn the heat up to about medium high to high and go find your wine .

I'm going to put half a cup of wine in and I think that was a half a cup .

So with your wooden spoon , you can just remove all those brown bits .

You turn the heat back down to about medium .

All right .

So we're gonna put in these tomatoes .

They smell great .

I'm gonna bring this up to a simmer here .

You're probably asking yourself why do you need two cans of tomatoes ?

Can I do it with one ?

Can you really can't , you need , you're gonna need four cups of the sauce just for when we mix the pasta and then you're gonna use some on the bottom and on the top .

So we'll let this thicken up a little bit .

Uh , you don't have to make , it doesn't have to get too thick .

It smells so good .

And also guys , you know , this is a very basic sauce here .

You're relying on the flavor of the sausage .

The , the , the big seasoning in , in the sausage meat .

Also don't forget to , uh , do a taste test for salt .

Boil the pasta in salted water .

OK .

Two tablespoons salt per gallon of water .

Boil it two minutes less than Al Dente .

So , whatever the box says , if it says 10 minutes for Al Dente , cook it to eight because we're gonna be baking this in the oven for another 25 minutes .

You can also set your oven for 375 F and set the rack to basically to two thirds up in the oven .

So in case you want to boil it at the end , got all that .

I'm gonna put about four cups of sauce in here .

I'm not going to measure it , but we're gonna need a lot .

So I would say probably two or three ladles equals a cup .

I think that's good for .

now .

The other thing you can do while we're waiting for that pasta to boil is take your baking dish and then put a nice layer in there that's gonna help pasta .

Not just all stick to the bottom about that much , about a quarter inch thin layer .

I'm gonna go get the pasta and I'm gonna dump it right in here , get our pasta in there .

I well drained that pasta .

I'm just gonna loosely combine this to start , have £1 of mozzarella .

We're going to take basically 3/4 of the mozzarella here .

So we're going to leave a quarter of it for putting on top about that much .

We'll leave £1 of Rita cheese .

This is Calabro , it's a fairly thick one .

You don't really have to pre drain it or anything .

Polio is like the one kind of ingredient that's very different than all the other brands .

And here's the Pecorino Romano , right ?

So gently fold this in or not gently , just fold it in without getting it all over your , all over your kitchen table .

And if you feel like you're a little too dry , just add a little bit more of the sauce .

The trick to making any baked pasta is that you have enough liquid in there because the pasta is gonna absorb it while it bakes .

If you start with it , like ultra dry and not enough cheese or anything like that , it's really pointless to even go through the effort of , of , of baking it .

Yeah , a little bit more sauce .

Now , I did this already because I always try to do these recipes in advance for you guys .

I know it fits .

Look at that , I'm gonna put a little bit more sauce on top , barely have any sauce left , right .

And then I'm gonna put the mozzarella on top too kind of in the center there .

Makes it look nice .

Going to bake this for roughly 25 to 30 minutes until it's nice and brown on top .

And what you can do is you can broil it for the last 1 to 2 minutes .

Now , it's very tempting to dig right into this baked pasta here .

Any big pasta you make lasagna , soft shells , anything you wanna let sit for 10 minutes , even 20 minutes , give it , give it at least 10 minutes .

OK ?

We're gonna bring them down right now .

You guys don't know , but we just did 13 hours prior to this .

What do we do ?

What did we do before this .

Um , it was like that chicken wrapped up in .

Yeah , chicken or chicken in .

That one will be out though after this .

Be careful , buddy .

It's good .

You can get a piece of sausage .

I love him .

Of course , I stand close to him because the mic is on me and he doesn't have a mic .

I'm gonna get a wireless mic .

It has two separate mics and a single receiver .

So then I can mic him up and then we don't have to like , I don't have to be like on top of you like this .

Like how's it , how , how is it James ?

0 to 10 .

James's ?

What do you think ?

Nine ?

Yeah .

Well , thank you for the nine .

I really appreciate that special thanks to Patreon producers , Chris Whale and Steve Winski .

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