Feeding a crowd for dinner? You probably don’t want to make a bunch of different dishes (it’s not Thanksgiving!) but you also don’t want people to leave the table hungry. For me, a no-brainer crowd-pleaser is almost always baked pasta. It’s easy to find all the ingredients at the supermarket—and they’re affordable.
But: I do have one qualm with classic iterations of baked pasta. They’re cooked in too deep a vessel. Most baked pasta recipes will have you assemble everything in a baking dish, so the top gets crisp and the rest of the casserole is soft. This means, for the average baked pasta, there are four good servings (the corners). The rest are mediocre at best, and gooey at worst. My solution? Baked pasta on a sheet pan.
Take my new Sheet-Pan Pepperoni Pasta recipe, for example. Evenly spread out in a thin layer on a half sheet pan, each piece of rigatoni is cloaked in sauce and melting cheese, yet comes out of the oven perfectly al dente, with delightfully crisp edges. No noodle lost in the depths of a casserole dish to steam into a mushy mass!
And let’s talk about the sauce. Instead of making tomato sauce on the stove, then folding in vegetables and pasta, you’ll make a highly concentrated tomato-veg mixture right in the oven. By roasting sliced mushrooms and onion coated in oily tomato paste, garlic, and oregano, the mixture caramelizes and develops a deeply rich flavor. Toss that with the pasta and plenty of starchy cooking water, then it continues baking.
Plenty of other baked pastas take well to the sheet-pan treatment. I’ve already shouted about why a sheet pan is my preferred vessel for mac and cheese. It’s also a win for other cheesy recipes, like this spicy broccoli rabe number, or this one with cauliflower and provolone. Old faithfuls (like baked ziti and tuna noodle casserole) and new favorites (like creamy feta pasta) alike both bake up swimmingly on a sheet pan.
The recipes won’t even need to be changed to accommodate the new pan—just keep an eye on bake time. With more surface area, they should finish cooking sooner. In my opinion, lasagna is the only baked pasta that truly shines when baked deep-dish. But even here, there are exceptions, as with this spinach and sausage version loosely inspired by the infamous extra-crispy two-sheet lasagna from New York’s Rolo’s.
At this point, I’ve made Sheet-Pan Pepperoni Pasta in the Test Kitchen half a dozen times. Next, I plan to sheet pan-ify this pasta alla Norma-inspired spaghetti pie. I’m going to double the recipe to channel the original’s height, then swap a sheet pan in for the cast-iron skillet. Just picture slicing little squares of this pasta-pie (maybe topped with dollops of seasoned ricotta?) at the dinner table. Yes! These are the kinds of dishes that make me reach for my phone to text my friends: Come over for dinner.
