Shortcut Baked Rigatoni With Spicy Italian Sausage

In One and Done, senior test kitchen editor Jesse Szewczyk uses one pan—like a Dutch oven, sheet pan, or cast-iron skillet—to make meals you’ll come back to again and again. Click here for even more one-pan meals.

Unlike most baked pasta dishes, this recipe for baked rigatoni doesn’t require you to pre-boil and drain the pasta. You won’t have to pull out a big pan to make a time-consuming marinara sauce, either. Instead, everything comes together in one big casserole dish. Starting with a looser sauce allows the dry pasta to soak up just enough liquid as the dish bakes, yielding a spoonable texture. And when all is said and done, you’ll have just one baking dish to clean.

The type of tomatoes you use matters. While we often recommend whole peeled tomatoes, here we found canned crushed tomatoes produced a meat sauce with just the right amount of clinginess.

This easy pasta recipe requires a good amount of oven cooking time, but it can be baked ahead if you’d like to serve it on a weeknight. Stash the baked rigatoni pasta, covered, in the fridge for up to three days. To reheat, cover it with foil and bake at 350° until warmed through (about 20 minutes).