Million Dollar Baked Ziti | Easy, Cheesy, Comfort Food Favorite

All right folks, look, we're going to keep up with that million dollar theme, right? Today we're going to make a million dollar baked ziti. And usually if you want to find like the common denominator when it comes to, you know, using the word million dollar, you got to have sour cream, ricotta cheese, you know, things like that, right? Trust me folks, make this, let me know down in the comment section below what you think about it. And then you know what, we're just going to go ahead and go right into it. Now you see, I got a few ingredients. These two to me are about the same, right? You can either go, you can go with a marinara or you can go with like a spaghetti sauce, whatever you want. It's really about the taste that you would like to have. This right here is totally up to you. I still don't know which one I'm going to use, but this right here keeps it real simple. And we got some other ingredients. This right here is going to be a level up. I'm going to go ahead and just set this right here so you guys can see, because I got a boiled pasta water, right? If I don't boil pasta water, I want my water to be flavorful so that our pasta have that, right? And obviously you're going to be using, you know, like ziti. Now don't forget the full ingredient list is on my website, that's smokingandgrillingwithab.com and that's w-i-t-a-b.com. All right, so look, first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and hit bake because we got to preheat, right? So we're using 375. We'll go ahead and start. We'll let that go on. Go. All right, so come on down here. Now I'm boiling water. What I want to do is I want to get my salt because I like to put a little salt in there, right? Everybody does that just give it a pinch. All right, so now that we have that there, let me grab a couple of more items. All right, so what I'm doing is I'm keeping up with the theme, right? The theme of being million dollar. So I'm going to go ahead and give this like a heaping tablespoon, put this in here and then we're going to get just a boiler, right? You see how it flavors that water. Look at that right there. We already put a little salt in here. There we go. We just use the pinch just to enhance it. Now, once it starts to boil, then we'll follow the instructions on our pasta and we have all these until they become al dente. All right, so now I'm going to go ahead. I got a little flame underneath the bottom of here. I got a medium high heat. I mean a medium high flame just to hurry up and build up some heat, right? So now that I put some extra virgin olive oil in here, that's garlic infused, by the way, I'm going to bring this down to a medium. Now I was just heating up my pan, right? This is 80, 20 ground beef. Let's see where we are right now. Oh, we good. And this seems to be ready. So we'll just go ahead and drop this in. Now this is again, 80, 20. That's one pound. In the past, you guys, I've been known to go ahead and try to add a lot of meat. You know, it kind of like ruins the dish, especially when you have things out. You know what I mean? I don't know where you guys go. Like if I go to Olive Garden and have it, you know what I mean? They just got the right amount. So I just decided to go ahead and just make it the way I'm supposed to make it. And that'll be with just saying one pound of meat. All right. So from back there, you guys probably won't be able to see that this is boiling. What I'm going to do is put this in there. I read my package. So I'm going to set mine to boil to al dente. Okay. So you can see you guys can look, there's a little bit of pink left. I'm going to sweep, bring all of this in there. I was about to say sweep. I don't know if that'd be the right word to say, push it all here to the center. I got my garlic press loaded up. As you can see now, we'll just go ahead and put this over here, right over the top, right? So this stops you from having to like rust. So you don't burn your garlic, right? Put it on top of something. I promise you, once it touches the pan, it'll become aromatic, right? So now we just move this around like this. You see the juices, that's all of the grease that has been rendered down. You know, all of the fat from our beef. I'll take this now. I just want to break this down just a little bit more. You see, you might have some thicker chunks. You know what I mean? Just get yourself one of these, right? This grinds that meat up just right. All right. So look at this right here. Nice, juicy. Now, some of you guys, listen, if you want to, I don't feel like there's not enough in here, even though we use one pound of 80-20. If I take it, that's not enough. That's the flavor in here. I feel like this will work great. If you guys want to go ahead and take some of that out without taking it and draining it, you guys can always get yourself. Let me see. Let me get myself a paper towel. You could just sop up some of this here, just a little bit. Don't do it. Man, I'm telling you, that's the flavor, you guys. But for some of you guys that are watching that grease, you know, the fat intake that you're taking, just wipe it just like this. Let's just get a little bit of that. You don't want to dry it out. Take a look at this right here. I got two things. We got a pasta sauce, right? Roasted garlic, or we can use ragu, right? They say, what do they say? Sauce flavored with meat. I'm going to go with this right here. Look better. But anyway, had this brand before. This right here is fire. We'll add this to that. I probably should have said something at the very beginning, you guys. You want to make sure you got a pan or you can make this in a pot, Dutch oven, anything like that. You want to make sure you got enough room. I sometimes make this in one of my little pans. It's a little shallow, but once you get everything mixed in here, you know, it starts coming to the edge. Just be tough on your cleanup. I'm not going to add no water to it or nothing like that. You know, make it watery. You can see how it's starting to come together. Now, I want you guys to talk to me down in the comment section below and tell me this. How do you guys want to do it? Do you guys like use a spaghetti sauce? You know what I mean? Or a marinara, whichever one, let me know. Or does it even make a difference to you? Okay. So check this out. Like we got a multitask, right? Pasta is working on his way to being al dente. We got our sauce, our ground beef. That's ready. Oh, one thing I will do right now is I'm going to add, this is kosher salt folks. I'm going to add just a pinch of, it's going to need a little bit more than that. Just a generous pinch of salt. And if we do a salt, why not do black pepper too? If you guys want to know why I always use black pepper in everything, it's because it takes on a whole different taste. It's not like just putting black pepper on your, uh, on your eggs, right? So look at that right there. Now just give this a mix. We want to get that salt evenly distributed throughout. I'm going to turn this down and put it on low right now because we got to go ahead and grade cheese, right? Now I'm going to take my parm, right? I'm going to use this medium size, not too small and not too large. I'm going to use the medium size. We just need a half a cup. I pull out my half a cup right here to measure for myself because I have a tendency to go ahead and put too much cheese in everything. That meat, I almost want to tell you, I got a heavy hand, so we just need a half a cup. Again, this is parm. Let's pull this up right here. As usual, I always got more cheese than I need, but I got a way to check myself, right? And the way I'm going to check myself is to take this, my half a cup, take this, drop this in here like that. There it is. Half a cup of shredded parm. Now you guys want to know why I do my own shredded cheese? I'm going to tell you why, because it melts better. It doesn't have that waxy film on there and all of that. It's okay for this to mix because it's all going in there anyway. Now, if you want to use the big side on this one, you can, but I stick to what I tell you guys. You know what? It's just this right here. Let's go ahead and grind myself out a couple of cups out of here. So now let me turn this off because my timer went off. I just reached my point, you know, to become al dente. Listen, I look at the comments and I hear everybody saying like, oh man, you rinsing off all of the flavor and all of that. But one thing I'm going to do, which I almost forgot to do, I'm going to leave that right there. I got to hurry up though, right? We always want to save some of this starchy water, right? So let me go ahead and get myself some. That's more than enough of what you need. You see that right there? That helps it. Since we want everything to be creamy, you can add this to your sauce. This is what helps the pasta and everything that you took the time to make. This is what helps it stick to the, to your pasta, right? I'm racing against the clock because I still want it to be al dente. Why? Because I don't want it to overcook. All right, so we'll drop that in there like that. It smells incredible already. Don't forget we flavored our water, right? So now I'm gonna grab this. We finna shock it and stop the cooking process. All right, so let's move all of these over here together. Just because it only got one measuring cup like that, this represents two, right? So we want to put all of this in here, right? So one cup, let's get it all right. Let me move this over here. I don't pack it, folks. You know what I mean? So look, I was right on the money. Now we're going to add our ricotta and our sour cream. Now you want to make sure you got a bowl big enough for this, right? Because we got to do a little bit of this folding. That's the best action, if you ask me. And that ricotta, you might want to bring that out and let it get, you know, room temperature, just so it can soften up, right? So we'll just take it, just do like this. Remember I said the fold action, probably be the best. You can already see where it's going though, folks. I can hear my meat and my sauce mixture simmering. I don't know if y'all can hear that, but it's working me, right? And we did save a million dollars, right? So check me out. We ain't always got to have the same old spaghetti we grew up on, same old meatloaf. You know what I mean? My mama had about 11 things that she would make. She might was only five. She was having it all the time, but that's what I grew up on. You know what I mean? She only showed out when it came time for like the holidays or her little Saturday portion. You want to spray your casserole dish, right? Remember you don't want nothing sticking. You want it to come out easy. And most of all, if you don't want to do any dishes, you want to make sure it's, you know, it's slide right up out of there. You know what I mean? You hit it with that dish rag and go. Now put that over there. I want you to pay attention. Look over here. I grated, this is the way it's supposed to look. I'm going to be fair and, you know, make sure everybody understand. Follow the instructions on the website, the recipe card, download that screenshot or whatever you got to do. Follow it that way. Your second time, make it the way you guys see me do it. Only thing the difference was I put two cups of mozzarella in there. Cause I like mine to be a little cheesy, but as far as everything else, everything is the same. So I did add some more to it. Cause look, you know, I got to have that cheese pull to do all of that. You guys let me know at the end of this video, what you guys think I'll know. Cause you already in here anyway. All right. We already sprayed all of that, right? So I always like to take myself just a couple of tablespoons. You know what I mean? Just to, it almost look like I don't have enough, but trust me made this so many times, just trust the process folks. This right here, you guys would be happy. Even though we sprayed it, you'd be happy that we just put something down here like this. Next, we're going to add a layer of pasta and then you got it. And the next thing you know, we're going to be looking like we're making a lasagna because we're going to do everything in layers. Grab my pasta and work this back and forth. Make sure nothing's stuck. We good there. You got to see it. Now I'm just going to put a little small there. All right. Okay. Now we got one layer down, right? I like for it to be kind of like flat, you know, flat as we can. Anything that sits over the top, you can probably like just take it out. Now we want to go ahead and just add this cheese mixture on top. Now we about to make this that million dollar ish, right? Now notice how I'm putting them in there. I'm just doing them like this. So I'm going to spread them. All right. Now if you guys notice, I only put a couple of dollops, you know, at a time in there. Why? Because it's thick. So I just like to spread this. Once I have it sprayed it, I always have some reserved and then I'll go ahead and just add. But this right here is what does it for you folks. Now I'm going to go ahead and add just a little bit here and a little bit there. Now if you guys got a better way to do it. I mean, if you feel like you can put it all in there, go ahead. You know what I mean? But for me, you see the way I do it and this makes it just simple, you know, so as you make it and as you make things like this, you come up with your own technique on your own end. All right. So we got a couple of ways we can do this part right here too. I'm just going ahead and adding myself just a small layer, just so I can have some in the middle. Remember earlier, I was talking about it being like a lasagna, right? So we just get it like this. We'll just add this on top of here. Just like you guys see, don't forget this is going to be on top of that mozzarella and we put some parm in here too. Don't forget. I got to keep saying that because we call this a million dollars. You won't make it no other way after this. All right. So once we here, now we just pour the remainder, the remainder of our pasta sauce, right? We'll just put this on top of here. You want to get full coverage over here on this side, like this. I'm going to show you something. I bet you guys thought I forgot about it. Let me move this back in the sink. I want you guys to pay attention right here. Look, I'm reheating and bringing my sauce back up. You'll get some heat under here. Now this is the part I'm talking about. You remember I told everybody about this, save some of this pasta water. Now we're about to go on top. I'm going to add a little bit in here like that. All right. Look at this right here. Just put that starchy water in here. This is going to help it, folks. You know what I mean? You guys should be doing this when you make macaroni and cheese and all of that. This is going to help the cheese stick to your pasta. You're making spaghetti. Come on, folks. Especially if you're making, well I'm going to say this, you do this if you're That's the way I like mine. You guys are going to let me know down in the comment section below, how do you like your pasta? Do you like your pasta? Let's see. You like your pasta on your plate and then a scoop of your sauce on top? I don't eat mine that way. I call that the restaurant way. You guys call it what you want to call it. I just like mine cooked inside of my sauce and I love it better the next day. All right. Now we go ahead and just layer the rest of this on here like this, right? I'm going to take it. I'm just going to work it from the front. You know what I mean? And just bring this back like this. You see that right there? And we got that starchy water in there too. All right. So I'm just putting the remainder of this cheese in here. So this is what we're going to do. I got myself some foil right here. I'm going to cover this, right? And we're going to put it in the oven for about, about 20 minutes. Then I'm going to take it out and then we're going to pull, remove this, right? And then we probably just go for about 10, 15 minutes max, but we're going to take a look at it uncovered, see how it comes out. Right. So let me get this going. And I don't think I told you guys the exact time. Okay, folks, look, I didn't want to bore you guys. You know what I mean? I had already gave you guys the instructions to go ahead and let it cook for a certain amount of time, right? All I did was uncover it and stick it back in there. Now, if you guys want to brown your cheese to have them little dark brown, you know, yummy looking all looks on it. You can keep it in there, you know, a little bit longer, but this is the way I did it. And I can tell you, I only went in for like about another, I almost went about 15 minutes. That was good enough for me, right? So here it is. You can see everybody been digging in at any way, you know, just trying to get a taste, but you guys can see, look at this, look at this cheese right here. Boy, when you do your pasta just right, it's nice and soft yet still stern. Remember, al dente when you start, cause you're going back in here. Listen, I'm not finna over talk it or nothing like that. I've been waiting to try this. Oh, cheers y'all. I see why everybody is standing behind the camera waiting to get down. This right here, fine. Remember million dollar series, right? All you guys got to do is go to my website, type that in, in the search bar, a million dollar, everything that we do, a million dollar will come up, right? Hey, tell me this. You guys like this little touch of having live basil, you know what I mean? Fresh basil. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna replant that and put that outside. In the spring time, I will be doing a video or two or three, or maybe a series. We're gonna garden too folks. It's just so much stuff we can do to just like elevate, you know, our cooking, right? Now with this right here, I'd already told you it's the best. Try it. Let me know what you think down in the comment section below. And you know what? We go from there. Now I'm gonna hurry up, wrap this up. So check this out. If you're new to my channel, let me take this time to say thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button and tell everybody out here. There's a channel out here that's simplifying these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. Y'all know what I'm about to do. I'm out y'all. Peace.