PASTA CASSEROLES

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES SEVERAL AMERICAN and Italian casseroles that start with pasta: turkey tetrazzini, macaroni and cheese, baked ziti, and lasagne.

Turkey tetrazzini can be very good, an interesting blend of toasted bread crumbs, silky sauce, and turkey meat, bound together by one of our favorite foods, spaghetti. Or, it can taste like cafeteria food. The downside of casseroles-that individual tastes and textures are fused and thus diminished-is acute with this dish. We found that baking the casserole in a shallow dish in a hot oven to prevent over-cooking makes a big difference in this recipe.

Next we adjusted the sauce. The traditional choice is Béchamel, a sauce in which milk is added to a roux, a whisked mixture of melted butter and flour. We decided to use a Velouté, a sauce based on chicken stock. This brightened up both the texture and the flavor, since dairy tends to dampen other flavors. We also played around a bit with the amount of sauce, trying larger and smaller quantities, and found that more sauce overran the taste of the other ingredients. In this case, less was more. The dish still needed a burst of favor, however, so we spruced it up with a shot of sherry and a little lemon juice and nutmeg, a bit of Parmesan cheese to provide tang and bite, and a full two teaspoons of fresh thyme.

Most recipes do not toast the bread combs before baking. This step does complicate the dish by adding an extra step (in a pinch, you can skip the toasting), but it is well worth it. Tossing the toasted bread crumbs with a bit of grated Parmesan also helps to boost their flavor.

Macaroni and cheese is another classic American pasta casserole. There are two distinct styles of macaroni and cheese. The more common variety is Béchamel-based. Here macaroni is blanketed with a cheese-flavored white sauce, usually topped with crumbs, and baked. The other variety is custard-based. In this style, a mixture of egg and milk is poured over layers of grated cheese and noodles. As the dish bakes, the eggs, milk, and cheese set into a custard. This macaroni and cheese is also topped with bread crumbs.

We tried both styles and were unimpressed. The Béchamel-based version was grainy and tasted like macaroni with cheese sauce. We preferred the cheesier-flavored custard version, but this dish still had problems-the dry custard had set around the noodles. Neither recipe had done the job of melding the cheese sauce and macaroni.

We then ran across a recipe in John Thorne's Simple Cooking (Penguin, 1989). His recipe starts with macaroni cooked just shy of al dente. The hot, drained macaroni is then tossed with butter in a heat-proof pan or bowl. Evaporated milk, hot red pepper sauce, dry mustard, eggs, and a large quantity of cheese are stirred into the noodles.

The combination is baked for 20 minutes, with cheese and milk additions and a thorough stir every 5 minutes. Frequent stirrings allow the eggs to thicken without setting, which results in an incredibly silky sauce. During cooking, the sauce settles into the tubular openings of the macaroni, offering a burst of cheese with each new bite. The results were fantastic.

Though the recipe was virtually perfect, we did consider a few refinements. First, we found that at the end of baking, the dish was hot but hardly piping. We also missed the contrasting textures of crunchy bread crumbs and soft noodles and sauce offered by the baked versions. Finally, we wondered if evaporated milk was really necessary.

After testing the recipe with whole and low-fat milks and half-and-half, we realized that evaporated milk was not an ingredient thoughtlessly added. All the macaroni and cheese dishes made with fresh milk curdled a bit, resulting in a chalky grainy texture. The one made with evaporated milk remained silky smooth. The evaporation and sterilization process stabilizes the milk, which in turn stabilizes the macaroni and cheese.

We found that you could not remedy the dish's lukewarm temperature problem by leaving it in the oven much longer than the suggested 20 minutes. If you do, you run the risk of curdling the eggs, and the dish starts to develop a subtle grainy texture. We wondered if we could cook the macaroni and cheese on top of the stove instead of in the oven. We found that by using a heavy-bottomed pot and cooking over low heat, it was possible to make the macaroni and cheese on top of the stove in less than five minutes. Not only was this method quicker, but it kept the macaroni and cheese piping hot. To add the standard bread crumb topping, we altered the macaroni and cheese in a casserole dish, sprinkled on the bread crumbs, and ran the dish under the broiler for several minutes.

With our classic American pasta casseroles perfected, we turned to baked ziti. This dish, with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, can be a delicious Italian casserole, or it can be dry and unappetizing, with hard, overcooked noodles. The key to avoiding these problems is to keep the pasta in the oven as briefly as possible and to use enough tomato sauce. When we just coated the noodles lightly with sauce, they tended to become dry and hard in the oven. Adding a little cooking water to the drained pasta also helped keep the casserole moist.

Aside from the pasta and tomato sauce, cheese is the other major component of this dish. If you can, use fresh mozzarella packed in water, which makes the texture of the finished dish especially moist and creamy. Mozzarella is a bit bland. We found that adding a quarter cup of Parmesan perks up the flavor. To ensure that the cheese is evenly distributed throughout the casserole, layer half of the pasta in the baking dish, sprinkle with half of the cheeses, then add the remaining pasta and cheeses and, finally, the sauce.

Lasagne made with no-boil noodles is another good example of a quick, satisfying casserole. These precooked, dried noodles eliminate the time-consuming step of boiling and draining the sheets of pasta, the noodles may simply be layered straight from the box into a baking dish with tomato sauce and cheese.

The challenge in creating this recipe was to figure out how to use the no-boil noodles. We tried them in a standard lasagne and found that they sucked all the moisture out of the sauce, leaving tiny bits of dried-out tomato pulp. The noodles were stiff, even crunchy in places. Clearly, the noodles needed more moisture to rehydrate.

The label on one brand of noodles suggested adding stock to the assembled lasagne. The result was a watery mess. We tried another manufacturer's suggestion to soak the noodles in hot water before layering them into the pan. This, too, caused the noodles to cook up soft and mushy.

We made some headway when we covered the pan with foil before it went into the oven. The steam trapped by the foil helped the noodles to soften without causing the sauce to dry out. Using more tomato sauce than you might in a standard lasagne with boiled noodles also helped rehydrate the noodles. We found that leaving the tomato sauce fairly watery (we simmered it for just five minutes) and then adding some water provided enough moisture, helping to make the pasta tender without becoming too soft.

Covering the lasagne with foil as it bakes does present one problem–the top layer of cheese won't brown. This was easily solved by removing the foil during the last 15 minutes of baking.