Most People Are Making Baked Ziti Wrong! Try These Old Italian Tricks

📖 A hundred recipes my mother never wrote down, finally measured for your kitchen: Link In Comments! You made a big tray of baked ziti, it went into the oven swimming in sauce, and it came out with hard, crunchy tubes on top, a dry block in the middle, and the ricotta gone grainy. Or the pasta turned to mush on the plate. It is not your sauce, and it is not your oven. You cooked the pasta at the wrong time and put too little sauce in the pan, because every recipe told you to. My mother Filomena made baked ziti for every christening, communion and funeral on the avenue in Bensonhurst, and it never once came out dry. In this one I count down her ten rules, and every one starts with plain instructions before I explain anything. The ridged ziti that holds the sauce, a simple twenty-minute sauce with the Sunday sausage, seasoning the ricotta, block mozzarella instead of the bag, tossing it in a bowl, ricotta in pockets instead of stirred through, covering every tube on top, foil on then off, the fifteen-minute rest, and at number one, the mistake that makes almost every tray dry before it ever goes in the oven. I also settle the ricotta argument, and whether baked ziti is real Italian food. A box of ziti, two cans of tomatoes, ricotta and mozzarella. Saucy every time. So tell me where you are cooking from, and settle it: ricotta, or no ricotta? 00:00 Dry on top, mush in the middle 00:58 Who I am 02:18 What you need 02:53 Why baked ziti goes dry 03:38 10. The right ziti 04:11 9. The sauce, and how much 05:00 8. Season the ricotta 05:37 7. The right mozzarella 06:19 6. Toss it in a bowl 06:55 Halfway 07:20 5. Ricotta in pockets 08:03 4. Cover every tube 08:40 3. Foil on, then off 09:29 2. Fifteen minutes of rest 10:04 1. Half-cooked pasta, loose sauce 11:36 Ricotta or no ricotta? 12:26 Why every recipe gets it backwards 12:58 One idea underneath all ten 13:35 Make it ahead, freeze it 14:19 Your job this week 14:44 Next time