Posted on: Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Food for Thought
New 'no-boil' pasta sauce short on taste

By Wanda A. Adams
Food Editor

Prego's latest addition to the growing menu of bottled pasta sauce products is Prego Pasta Bake Sauce ($3.49 a 27.5-ounce bottle on introductory sale), designed to cut time and trouble by allowing you to bake dried pasta right in the sauce, without boiling the noodles first.

This isn't a new idea; recipes have long circulated for "no-boil" lasagna and several brands of no-boil dried pasta exist (Gourmet magazine praises Barilla brand in a recipe this month; it's widely available).

Food columnist Elaine Magee ("The Recipe Doctor") recommends using bottled sauce thinned with chicken broth in which to bake uncooked pasta.

Since the conventional wisdom is that dried pasta must be cooked in lots of briskly boiling salted water, I was interested to see how the new sauce would work. The technique is simple: Pour some of the sauce into a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Add 16 ounces dried ziti or spirelli. Blend remaining sauce with one bottle (27.5 ounces) water and pour over pasta. Cover tightly with foil and bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes. Top with 8 ounces shredded mozzarella and bake an additional 10 minutes.

The pasta does, indeed, cook in the sauce. In fact, it overcooks, so that the noodles are loose and mushy. The sauce was thin, the flavor thinner and the mozzarella did nothing to help.

My "homemade" bake sauce based on Magee's recipe was thicker and more flavorful, but still needed a more assertive mix of cheeses stirred through the casserole, not just scattered over the top. If you want to blend in fresh chopped herbs, more garlic, some ground beef or sausage sauteed with onions or made into meatballs, do so when you add the cheese.

Here's the "homemade" technique for no-boil baked ziti: Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Blend 1 bottle of your favorite sauce (I used Classico di Napoli, 26-ounce bottle) with one 14.5-ounce can chicken broth plus 1 cup water. Pour some of the thinned sauce into a 13-by-9-inch baking dish. Add 16 ounces ziti. Stir. Pour remaining sauce over. Cover tightly with heavy-duty aluminum foil. Bake for 25 minutes or until sauce is bubbling and pasta is just al dente. Gently fold in 3 ounces EACH grated mozzarella, Monterey Jack and Parmesan cheeses; sprinkle a little more cheese on top. Bake an additional 10 minutes with foil off.

I'm not sure how much time this actually saves. What it saves is washing a pot and a colander and having to fuss much after the dish is in the oven.