spaghetti bake

Baked spaghetti is just really satisfying sometimes, but making a big sauce is a whole lot like time I could spend doing not at the stove. Instead, store bought marinara (or whichever sauce you’d prefer, tomato sauces will hold up better in the oven) comes in clutch. Sometimes there’s a benefit to being lazy, and here it’s a comforting meal with relatively little investment.

Ingredients

• 12oz spaghetti
• 16 oz italian sausage, crumbled
• 32-36 oz jar marinara
• 8 oz melting cheese (mozzarella, monterey jack, etc.)
• 1 oz garnish cheese (parmesean, asiago, etc.)
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 green bell pepper, finely diced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced, or a head of roasted garlic, squeezed
• 2 tsp italian seasoning
• ½ tsp paprika
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• Salt & pepper to taste

Preparation

1. Heat oven to 400°F, setting up a middle rack, and put a pot of water on to boil. Wash & cut veggies. Grate the cheese.
2. Set a chef’s pan over medium heat, adding olive oil. Crumble the italian sausage in once the oil is shimmering, then brown. Strain cooked sausage from the pan and reserve.
3. Add onion to the rendered fat from the sausage, and cook until lightly browned and translucent. Add the bell pepper, and sweat. Lastly, toss in the herbs, paprika, and garlic.
4. Stir momentarily, then add marinara. At this point, re-add the sausage, and bring to a light simmer, before reducing heat.
5. While pasta sauce is heating, attention moves to the spaghetti. Salt the water to your preference, then add the spaghetti. I prefer to split it in half here, since long strands will work to your detriment later, and cook until just under done; the near edge of al dente is perfect. My current pasta provides an 11 minute cook time; I cooked mine to 9 minutes, the near edge of ready.
6. As the pasta cooks, spray down a hotel pan or sufficiently deep baking dish with baking spray.
7. Strain pasta into a holding bowl. Add about half of the pasta to the hotel pan, then stir in about half the sauce, enough to incorporate. Grate some melting cheese (maybe a little under half) into the pan, then combine the remaining sauce with the remaining pasta in the holding bowl–making sure to drain the pasta well first–so as to not disturb the cheese layer when adding the remaining pasta into the dish. Layer this top portion on, then top with melting and garnish cheese, mixed.
8. Wrap with foil, bake for 20 minutes on the middle rack.
9. Unwrap, and set the oven to broil. Leaving the rack in the centre, broil another roughly 3 minutes. This crisps up the cheese and lends it that baked-parmesean flavour.

Notes

I use a hotel pan for this dish because it’s that matching top surface to pan bottom ratio; the sides don’t slump from being too understructured for the firm top. I recognize that hotel pans aren’t standard home kitchen equipment; a 9x13 baking dish would probably also work.

I’ll be honest, this is a “throw together with grocery store ingredients” recipe. My local grocery stores all have take-and-bake garlic bread, and I am definitely not above grabbing one of those and tossing it in the oven partway through this bake. There are some extra steps here to note:

Store-bought Garlic bread addendum

1. At roughly 7 minutes remaining, place foil-wrapped garlic bread on the middle rack alongside the pan.

2. If you prefer a soft-crusted garlic bread, you can stop here.

   (Optional) When turning the oven up to broil, take the loaf out and unwrap it. Return the bread to the oven to bake uncovered.

3. Broil for a couple of minutes, until your preference.