My two-sauce baked ziti.
Sauce number one is just a bechamel sauce,
a straight-up white sauce.
You take equal amounts of butter and flour.
I've got about three tablespoons of butter in the pan,
melt that, when it bubbles,
add about the same amount of flour,
that's your roux or your thickening agent.
And to that, we're going to add a combination
of milk and cream, or all whole milk, whichever you prefer.
I like a little milk and cream,
and you add warm to warm.
Hot liquids to your roux.
And for white sauces in my family, we use white pepper.
This'll thicken up literally immediately for you.
A little bit of nutmeg,
and all things white and all things dark green.
And,
that's done.
(laughs) A little bit of salt in the sauce
and over the shoulder for luck.
(sighs)
Okay,
that sauce is done, so I'm gonna just turn that off.
Back here, I've got water boiling for our ziti.
I get ziti with lines, ziti rigate,
and we're going to add a lot of salt to that water.
You're going to par-boil this only five minutes,
you're only half-cooking the ziti,
and then you're gonna cold-shock it in the sink,
put it in a colander, drain it, shake it,
and run it under cold water to stop the cooking process.
So, five-minute pasta there.
Over here, I'm sweating out onions
in a combination of these three things.
Sweet Italian sausage with fennel,
ground beef or veal, I have ground beef,
and some diced pancetta.
We are going to use a lot of finely chopped rosemary,
and we've sweat out our onions,
so now it's time to add our garlic, grated or chopped,
or thinly sliced.
A few fat cloves.
(sniffs) Smells amazing, the rosemary,
I threw a bay leaf in here,
a little salt and pepper, the ground beef,
the sweet sausage, the pancetta, oh.
Now, we're gonna get up all those little, brown bits,
all of that color is flavor on the bottom of our pot,
so we're gonna lift that up with a fat dose
of white wine, or red,
whichever the cook prefers. (laughs)
Fabulous, once you get that lifted up from the bottom,
you're going to add a fat can of Italian crushed tomato.
For the cheese layer, I have some fresh ricotta.
We're gonna combine that with eggs,
a little grated parm,
some diced mozzarella,
and a little chopped, flat-leaf parsley.
I'm gonna mix together our cheese layer.
When we come back,
we'll layer all this together in our casserole dish,
right after this.
(audience applauds)
Okay, your five-minute ziti, drain it,
throw it back in the hot pot.
Then, you're going to throw it together with your sauce,
right, your meat sauce with the sausage and the beef,
and the pancetta, and if you're using it,
a little chicken liver.
Then, you take some of your starchy, salty cooking water
that you reserve right before you drain the pasta,
mix that all together.
Now, we're going to take half,
approximately,
of this and pour it into our big casserole, right?
Then, we're going to add all of our ricotta,
mozzarella, egg,
and parsley mixture.
Then, we're going to top that with
the rest of our meat sauce layer.
And then, you top it with the bechamel.
(audience awes)
I told you, (audience laughs)
and this is a heck of a lot easier
than layering a lasagna, I'll tell you that.
And then, you finish it with a little parmigiano.
(audience applauds)
I'm gonna throw this in the oven.
When we come back, I'll show you what it looks like
when it's all cooked up.
So,
everybody here got a lasagna lugger earlier in the show
so they could lug this two-sauce baked ziti around,
any place they'd like as well.
So basically, it's just bechamel and a meat sauce,
married together with a layer of ricotta
and mozzarella cheese in the middle.
Honestly, people love this,
and it's just as hearty and a lot easier to serve
and travel with. (audience applauding)