4-Ingredient Eggplant Pasta Bake Recipe

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Baked pasta is high on the list of oven-baked dinners the whole family will love. Cooking pasta in the oven with other ingredients like sauce and cheese turns regular pasta into an extra comforting meal. Baked pasta can range from the simple to the elaborate, and this dish is a perfect example of the former, requiring only four ingredients — eggplant, tomato sauce, mozzarella, and rigatoni (plus extra virgin olive oil, salt, and pepper, of course).

Since I wanted to stick to four ingredients, I decided to build the dish on eggplant. This humble vegetable transforms into an extra-tasty version of itself when fried in oil and sprinkled with salt. It also adds a hearty texture to the vegetarian dish. To keep things simple, the recipe calls for a jarred tomato basil pasta sauce, although you can certainly make your own if you prefer. Choose fresh mozzarella if you can over the processed brick, because both the flavor and texture are worlds apart. The last ingredient is rigatoni, but other short tubular pasta would also work fine.

Make sure to boil the pasta a couple of minutes less than you normally would for an al dente consistency. That will prevent it from getting too soft when it cooks again in the oven. Making baked pasta is a great way to serve a flavorful, crispy-on-top, delightfully melty cheesy dish without doing a lot of hard work in the kitchen. Keep this recipe in mind the next time you want to make a satisfying and impressive dish that's easy enough for a weeknight.

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

Michelle Bottalico/Mashed

As this dish is very simple, it's easy to bump it up a notch with more ingredients if you don't want to stick to the 4-ingredient version. Adding more cheese is one way you can do this. Besides the mozzarella, you could add grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese, both in the pasta mixture as well as sprinkled on top. Other cheeses you can mix with the mozzarella inside the dish are provola, scamorza, ricotta salata, and caciocavallo, if you can find them in Italian specialty shops, as they are not as common in the U.S., or else provolone or fontina, which are easier to find. Chopped hard-boiled eggs can be added to this dish, and for those not making a vegetarian dish, cubed ham. Fresh basil is another good addition. Tear a few leaves by hand and add them to the pasta mixture or scatter them on top after baking.

A generous sprinkling of breadcrumbs over the dish before baking will turn into a crispy crust that adds a nice texture to the surface of the baked pasta. For extra flavor, mix some minced parsley or basil, minced garlic, and grated cheese with the breadcrumbs before sprinkling it, and drizzle a little olive oil on top before you put the pasta bake in the oven.

There are a few vegetables that pair well with eggplant and would be a great addition to this baked pasta dish. Consider adding peppers and zucchini along with the eggplant. Mushrooms and onions are also good choices. You'll need to cook the additional vegetables first: You could fry them like the eggplant, or roast them for a lovely depth of flavor. If you like them, olives and capers would be a nice briny-tangy touch in this dish. Cherry tomatoes are a vegetable that would work well here, and you could even make a tomato sauce yourself with fresh cherry tomatoes to give this dish a special flavor and texture.

Instead of eggplant, consider making baked pasta with cauliflower, which would be delicious in a version of baked pasta that doesn't have red sauce, but béchamel instead. Cook chopped cauliflower (in butter if desired), combine it with mixed cheeses, transfer it to a baking dish, and cover it with béchamel before baking until golden. This same method can be used for other vegetables that are tasty in a white sauce, like asparagus, artichokes, broccoli, zucchini, mushrooms, spinach, and peas.