Baked Ziti (with Rigatoni). Justin Tsucalas/photos; Marie Ostrosky/food styling, for The Washington Post Much like the Santa Claus impersonator in my favorite Christmas movie, “Elf,” baked ziti has been sitting “on a throne of lies.” Though it sparkles with the magic and allure of a comforting pasta bake, it makes a lot of promises it doesn’t keep.
And while it has the potential to be sublime, it’s often underwhelming, featuring overcooked, gummy noodles and grainy, soupy sauce. But its popularity online means that the name clearly has some kind of cachet. Ziti is a medium tubular pasta with a smooth outside and traces its roots to the Campania and Sicily regions of Italy.
While baked pasta dishes in Italy date back centuries, baked ziti is part of the Italian American culinary canon and features the titular noodle in a flavorful tomato sauce, with plenty of shredded cheese for heft, flavor and that photogenic melty pull. A few months ago, I decided that I wanted a go-to baked ziti recipe that was going to be consistently good and praiseworthy. I tried a bunch of recipes, and none blew me away.
I wanted sublime results, the kind that make you go and get seconds against your better judgment. As I often do, I went down a rabbit hole that forced my family to eat multiple mediocre results all in the name of recipe testing. In my numerous attempts to reach my platonic ideal, I arrived at some unexpected conclusions.
First, the best baked ziti isn’t made with ziti but.