baked ziti, really?

Jim was browsing through a Cook's Illustrated magazine I had out on the kitchen table, when he spotted a recipe for baked ziti that he wanted me to make.  Really?  Baked ziti?  The only memory I had of baked ziti usually involved some awful Italianesque buffet table, sporting a dish with mushy, over-cooked pasta coated in dried-out sauce, and topped with a rubbery coat of cheese.  No thanks.  But, the magazine article swore it fixed all of those problems, so I thought, "Why not give it a whirl?"

The basic recipe included both tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, cottage cheese rather than ricotta, garlic, fresh basil, heavy cream, oregano, mozzarella, and Parmesan.  Along with ziti, of course.  I didn't have any ziti, but I did have penne, and plenty of it, so I used that instead.  Jim likes some meat in most of his meals, so I added in some browned hot Italian sausage.

The recipe called for creamy cottage cheese, which is often labeled "country style".  That gets combined with a couple of eggs.

cottage cheese?  I'll give it a whirl--whisked up here with two eggs

The sauce involved sauteing the garlic, adding both tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, oregano, black pepper, and a bit of sugar to highlight the tomato flavor.  I had a few late season tomatoes hanging about on the counter, so I chopped those up as well, and added some sausage I had cooked off earlier.

so far so good--the sauce was nicely balanced.  I added

the fresh basil at the last minute

While the sauce simmered for a few minutes, I whisked a teaspoon of cornstarch into the heavy cream, and cooked that until it had thickened.  Then that is stirred into the cottage cheese mixture.  The pasta gets boiled for about half the normal cook time, so it is VERY al dente.

mozzeralla gets cubed--easier to do if it goes into the freezer for 

half an hour

Once the pasta is cooked, some of everything gets combined in the pasta pot--the pasta, a cup of the tomato sauce, half of the mozzarella, and the cottage cheese.

not particularly appetizing to look at at this stage, 

though it was very creamy

That mixture gets put into a casserole, topped with the remaining tomato sauce, and dotted with the remaining mozzarella, along with a generous grating of parm.  It is then covered with foil and baked for about 30 minutes.

30 minutes in the oven, then the foil comes off

30 minutes more, and the top is crisp and brown

the final dish, after a 20 minute rest, was quite tasty

Okay, so it was good.  But it was complex to prepare, along the lines of a good lasagna in terms of steps and pots, pans, bowls, and mess.  Like lasagna, it can be prepared ahead, and the kitchen mess tackled well ahead of dinner, but if I am going to go to that much trouble, I think I will stick with the more complex and versatile lasagnas I make.   It made a lot.  So we have an uncooked pan in the freezer.  I'll be interested to see how it is after a stint in cold storage...