Recipe: Feed a Crowd With This Rich, Sausage-Laden Pasta Bake

Deborah Kaloper’s cookbook Pasta Night is a love letter to carbs. In it, you’ll find more than 60 recipes ranging from elaborate showstoppers to quick weeknight classics. It’s like a choose-your-own pasta adventure: you might spend an afternoon rolling gnocchi by hand, whip up crab-laced squid ink linguine to impress at a dinner party, or simply lean on pantry staples for carbonara or cacio e pepe.

This low-input, high-output pasta bake sits somewhere in the middle. It cleverly uses ziti, a tubular pasta similar to penne that’s ideal for catching sauce and melting cheese in every bite. The pasta is tossed through a tomato base enriched with sausage, fennel seeds and a kick of chilli, then baked under a blanket of mozzarella, pecorino and ricotta until it’s bubbling and golden.

The result is a hearty dinner that feels equal parts comforting and celebratory – the kind of meal that feeds a crowd, makes excellent leftovers, and reminds you why pasta night is always a good idea.

Deborah Kaloper’s baked ziti with sausage

Serves 8 or more
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 1 hour

Ingredients

2tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for greasing
20g butter
½ onion, finely diced
650g Italian pork sausages, casings removed
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
½ tsp fennel seeds, crushed
½ tsp dried chilli flakes, crushed
800ml passata
250ml (1 cup) chicken stock
Handful of basil leaves
Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper
500g dried ziti
250g fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced
50g pecorino, finely grated
250g (1 cup) good-quality firm ricotta

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease a 33cm × 23cm baking dish with oil.

Heat oil and butter in a large frying pan over medium–low heat. Add the onion and sauté for 5–7 minutes, until soft and translucent.

Crumble in the sausage meat and cook for 7–9 minutes, until well browned, then add the garlic, fennel seeds and chilli flakes and sauté for one minute or until fragrant. Pour in the passata and stock and simmer for 15–20 minutes, until the sauce has thickened slightly and the sausage is cooked through. Stir in the basil leaves and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the ziti to one minute less than al dente. Drain and toss the ziti through the cooked sauce.

Spoon half the ziti mixture into the baking dish and top with half the mozzarella and half the pecorino. Repeat with the remaining ziti, mozzarella and pecorino, then dollop large spoonfuls of ricotta over the top. Cover the dish with a sheet of baking paper, followed by a sheet of foil, and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the foil and paper and bake for a further 15–20 minutes until the cheese has melted and the sauce is bubbling.

Allow to rest for 5 minutes before serving.

Images and text excerpted from Pasta Night by Deborah Kaloper, published by Smith Street Books in 2023 ($29.99). Photography by Emily Weaving. This is an edited extract.

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