Third time’s a charm.
If you’ve been following along, last week I made some pork shoulder into a White Guy’s Oven-Braised Carnitas. That was a tasty meal, but we barely put a dent in the 7ish pounds of pork, even after having carnitas tacos for lunch the following day.
Not one to waste a big pile of delicious meat, I decided to turn some of the pork into a tomato sauce to serve over pasta. There’s nothing traditional about that recipe, even if some of the flavors in a roasted carnitas overlap with Italian American cuisine.
I made a simple sauce with garlic, onion, crushed tomato, and tomato paste. The acidity from the tomato and the citrus in the pork worked well together, and slow cooking the sauce enriched the flavors. One concession I made was removing pieces of citrus from the pork before adding it to the sauce. There was a hint of citrus, but that never hurt a red sauce.
We cooked up rigatoni and mixed in some porky sauce.
But after a night of pasta with porky tomato ragù, we still had plenty of sauce left over. At this point I froze about two pounds of carnitas; sometime next week we’re planning on enchiladas, which I guess makes it fourth time’s the charm.
After a rigatoni pork sauce lunch we were ready for pasta night, round two. My wife wanted to make a baked ziti. Please note, I realize the pasta in the photograph is not actually ziti. Sometimes a four-year-old chooses the pasta shape while in the grocery store (although this does not prevent him from demanding a totally different shape is cooked and served to him for dinner).
My wife took the pork sauce and made a new sauce. At this point we were basically cooking up a perpetual stew. A baked ziti sauce should be thinner, and so we needed to add some tomatoes to loosen what was leftover. The pasta and sauce were added to a glass baking dish along with dollops of ricotta cheese and slices of mozzarella. I’m more likely to increase the volume of ricotta over what my wife spooned on, but she did manage to get beautiful caramelization on the tips of the cheese.
Baked ziti is fairly common in Italian American cooking, but it also has a relatively direct connection in Italian cuisine. Ziti al forno, meaning from the oven, was a common wedding dish in and around Naples a century and a half ago. The immigrants who arrived in the early 20th century brought the tradition with them and then adapted these celebratory dishes with ingredients available to them in the United States. They also turned meals once reserved for events like weddings into more regular meals, especially on Sundays.
Now of course baked ziti is found on bodega hot plates and reception hall buffets. It’s a cost effective way of serving a lot of people. The more pressing issue is whether you consider baked ziti a casserole.
We baked up our porky ziti (which was not in fact ziti at all but a type of fusilli). Our four-year-old demanded ring shaped pasta, and he probably wouldn’t have eaten baked ziti anyway. And then we ended up with leftovers once again.
Baked Ziti With Leftover Tomato Sauce That Was Made with Leftover Carnitas
Ingredients
1-2 cups leftover pork ragù
1 can whole tomatoes
1 onion
A few pieces of garlic
Ziti (or pasta shape of your four-year-old’s choice)
Ricotta cheese
Low-moisture mozzarella
Instructions
Make the sauce (thin of this as a Bake Off Technical challenge)
Cook pasta in water
Combine the pasta and sauce
Make a layer of pasta in the in a casserole dish
Dollop ricotta onto the pasta
Add another layer of pasta
Add dollops or ricotta to the top layer, unless you prefer it with less delicious, creamy ricotta cheese, in which case you can skip this step
Slice mozzarella and place loosely on the pasta
Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes at 350F
Sprinkle with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (or substitute Wisconsin Parmesan if the tariffs are hitting your cheese monger)
If you want to follow Rosner’s Rules, garnish with a sprinkle of parsley
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