Homemade Italian Baked Ziti | ITALIAN DINNER | Beef | Pasta Meal | The Southern Mountain Kitchen

Hello friends and welcome to the southern Mountain kitchen today we're making homemade Italian baked [Music] ziti so we're starting out with a large Skillet on medium high heat and adding three to four tablespoons of olive oil to this and then we're going to add in a cup of onion pepper blend which is basically green pepper red pepper and onion which if you were cutting these up from just regular vegetables you would need a of a cup of each and we're going to actually Heat this up and let it thaw out a little bit in the pan for about like 2 to 3 minutes before we add our next ingredient to it so go ahead and move it around if you have fresh vegetables you're going to actually be cooking them a little bit as well when you're doing this and then as we get this a little warmed up we are going to end up adding 1 tablespoon of minced garlic on top of our peppers and we're going to cook that in we're not trying to go for like a long time for this cooking in pan we just want to actually make sure that if it's fresh vegetables they've softened up a bit if they were frozen then we've gotten them thawed out and they're ready for the next ingredients but turn it constantly as you're cooking this to make sure that everything is cooking evenly and nothing is staying on the bottom and getting scorched or whatever so go ahead and move it around a bit as you're cooking make sure that everything is getting a chance to be cooked top and bottom so this is where the spatula is your friends so you can flip stuff over and as these actually come up to temperature and they're cooked really well we're going to get ready to move on to adding our ground beef into this so you're going to use a pound of ground beef now if you are not a fan of using ground beef in this you could use Italian sausage it's your choice whichever you want to use but either way you're going to need about a pound of it so we've always used ground beef in my family when making this and that's what I'm going for here you know you could even mix part ground beef and part Italian sausage which would taste amazing if you did it so go ahead and get this broken up a bit and we're going to cook this and start mixing everything together but the whole goal here is to Brown the ground beef and get it completely done now on top of this we are adding in one teaspoon of salt and a half a teaspoon of pepper so we want to give it a little bit of flavoring so as you're mixing this up and turning your ground beef over it's cooking we want to make sure that we break this up into little pieces pieces we don't want huge hunks of the ground beef or even if you're using the Italian sausage we just want to make sure that we break it to a point where it's easily manageable and easily eaten so we're not trying to have something as huge as a meatball sticking out here so we're going to go ahead and break this up but as we're breaking it up we're going to move the peppers and onions into the ground beef as well because we really want to give everything a chance to mingle get the flavor and then get that ground beef browned off so this is going to take a few minutes to do but remember remember that you need to actually move this every few minutes to make sure that you are one breaking it up but two getting it browned now along the way as you're cooking this if you notice that you have a lot of Grease developing in your pan because sometimes ground beef does that um you want to spoon some of that out of there or remove it from the pan before we add any kind of sauce to this because we don't want it mixing in because then you'll get a greasy sauce and it's not always Pleasant to eat so we're going to keep going with this we're going to keep Browning it and when you get to a point where it's really Brown if you decide that you have way too much grease in your pan go ahead and remove it it's perfectly fine it does happen so cuz by the time I get to my point of getting ready to add tomato sauce to this I will be removing grease from My Pan as well so keep turning this over I would come back to it like you know almost every minute or so and just flip this around a little bit to make sure that it's cooking completely through but remember we are on a medium high heat and it shouldn't take long for this to do its deal now now when you first put meat into your pan you know it's going to take a minute for it to start cooking so it does happen but just go ahead and work this as best you can until you start Browning now coming up we will be after we gotten all of the grease out of here adding in tomato sauce and everything else to this to start actually making a really great stuff that's going to go over top of our noodles because we're going to make a great sauce with meat and everything that's going to be so great because there's nothing better than a good meat sauce but it just has to be made right so go ahead and keep turning your stuff until we see that this is really Brown and as you can see with mine I am at that point now where I'm ready to go ahead and add more to this and I've already removed as much of the oil that I want to remove for mine the greases out of there so I'm adding 24 oz can of tomato sauce now mine was traditional flavored um you could actually experiment and use a different flavor if you want on this I just went straight forward with the traditional Taste of this and basically it's just 24 ounces and then to this I'm going to add 14.5 o can of diced tomatoes and these are the Italian flavored ones that have the basil garlic and oregano in it which again that's going to punch the flavor of everything else that we're doing here so go ahead once the tomato sauce and the tomatoes are in and stir them through the peppers onions and ground beef and everything to make sure that you've got this really good and mixed together before we do anything else to it and we're going to like let this simmer for like a second here and then we're going to add some seasoning to it so we're adding 1 teaspoon of Italian seasoning and I know people are going to say something really nasty about this next part but I add sugar to this which makes it kind of like a marinara but it cuts down on the acidity of the tomatoes and takes away a little bit of that harsh taste so we're going to use about 2 tpoon of sugar and we're going to mix it in and it's going to taste really great and if you haven't done this before just try it it really won't hurt you but it does give it such a great flavor and it cuts down on that edge of that taste that some sometimes tomatoes are really kind of like harsh um this helps that but there's nothing wrong with something that kind of has a little bit of a marinara taste to it cuz that just it's so good that way and it's just something to give you a different kind of taste if you're not used to it I'm not saying that you have to use the sugar you don't and you know what I fix it sometimes myself without sugar in it so it's perfectly fine so we're going to set our sauce to the side and just let it be for a few minutes and we're going to have a medium pot here which we're adding some oil and some salt too so that way when we put the Ziti in it doesn't stick and then we're going to go ahead and put a pound of ZD in so that way once this water's at heat we're going to put the ZD into it and we're going to actually let this cook for the instruction time on the box because everything has its own cook time on it I would say this is probably about 10 minutes but your box may say something different on it you know um at this time you want to preheat your oven to 370° because it won't be long before we're assembling this and getting it into the oven so we're going to take uh I would say this is a 9 1/ 12 by 13 pan we're going to spray it with some non-stick cooking spray because we don't want this setting up shot because if it does it's going to be something you have to scrape out of there and then once we get this all ready to roll we are going to bring over our drained ziti we've already taken the water out of it and we're going to put this in the bottom of here and and yes it is still steaming and once this is in place we're going to go ahead and get ready to add our sauce over top of it now you can actually see it again okay so pour your sauce over top and then once we get the sauce in here we're going to kind of distribute it amongst the noodles by moving it around a little bit pushing it from side to side top to bottom make sure it covers the whole thing now mind you as this is baking in the oven the sauce is going to work its way through the noodles anyway but kind of want to move it through a little bit just to make sure that it's getting everything a little bit coated so that thing like when it's an the oven it doesn't like totally not let some of the noodles get the sauce and then some of them turn hard we don't like hard noodles so then we're going to take on top of this we're going to put some Parmesan cheese which is about a/ third of a cup just sprinkle it all over the top of there and then we're going to add about 2 cups of mozzarella on top of this this is going to give it like this really great layer of cheese on top of there so when you're scooping this out you're you're going to get a lot of cheese sometimes you're going to get a lot of sauce you're going to get a lot of noodles and it's such a great thing cuz it all mixes together to make such a wonderful meal so this is just one of the best things now when we get this all coated it's going into the oven for 30 minutes and when it comes back it will look something like this and I got to tell you this is so worth the effort of making this wonderful meal because it is something you will love I hope you like this video and if you did please like And subscribe and if you get a chance check out the southern Mountain kitchen website where you can get a free recipe check out the cookbooks available from the southern Mountain kitchen and if you'd like to you could order a cookbook at a discounted price cheaper than Amazon with shipping that is also cheaper than Amazon so if you get a chance check it out and I hope you have a great day

Channel: The Southern Mountain Kitchen

Views: 148

Keywords: Baked Ziti, Italian, Italian dinner, pasta, what’s for dinner, mozzarella, cheese, Ziti dinner, Ground Beef, pasta dinner, Home Cooking, beef, ground beef, ground beef recipe, Southern Food, easy recipe, comfort food, homemade, cooking at home, made from scratch, recipe, Put God First, The Southern Mountain Kitchen, Southern Cooking, Recipe, Homemade food, baking, like mama made, Food, Foodie, Mom’s Cooking, Best Recipe, Delicious Recipe, Budget Recipe, Easy Recipe

Id: WeXLjGavZwc

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024