Make Stuffed Shells Even Easier By Skipping This Step

A pan of homemade stuffed shells ranks pretty high in the world of easy-to-make dinners. All you need is tomato sauce, the holy trinity of ricotta, mozzarella, and parmesan cheese, and jumbo pasta shells, and you have a one-pan dinner that even picky kids will eat. The hardest part of the whole process, really, is stuffing all those slippery shells, so it might blow your mind to know that there's an easier way: just skip boiling the pasta.

Cooked pasta shells are a pain to handle. Not only do they flop around all over the place when you're trying to fill them, but they're also fragile and easily rip before you can get them into the pan. With a little tweak to the tomato sauce, however, you can fill the shells while they're dry, cover them with sauce, and bake them in the oven until they're nice and tender. All you need to do is add some extra liquid to the sauce and cover it for at least half of the cooking time.

A pan of no-bake stuffed shells is not an entirely unthinkable idea. No-boil lasagna is so popular that most people just buy parboiled noodles these days (aka no-boil noodles), and shells are just pasta sheets in a different shape. The reason we've been boiling shells all this time is because we think it's required, but actually pasta will start to absorb liquid at just 180 degrees Fahrenheit, which is easy to achieve in an oven. The key is to give the pasta enough liquid to absorb in the hot oven without leaving the sauce too watery, and to cover the dish so that all the moisture doesn't escape. If you've ever made a rice casserole, the same principle applies.

If you're ready to make some no-boil stuffed shells, all you have to do is add an extra cup or two of water or stock to the pan after you've stuffed the dried shells. The casserole will look a little watery going into the oven, but that's okay because the pasta will absorb all that extra liquid. Then, cover the pan tightly with some aluminum foil and bake for at least 30 to 45 minutes to give the casserole a chance to heat all the way through and absorb the liquid. Once the shells are looking tender and the sauce is bubbling, you can take the foil off and finish baking until the top of the casserole is golden brown.

Besides taking less work in the prep stage, baking a batch of stuffed shells has a few more distinct advantages over boiling. The first is that you'll always have the right number of shells. Boiling requires some guesswork as to how many shells will actually make it into the pan. Sometimes you'll have too many pieces of pasta left over, and other times there won't be enough depending on how many of them rip during the filling stage. The only catch is that you can't stuff dried shells if they're not open, so you'll have to pick through the box of dried shells to find the ones that have enough of an opening to get filling inside. Save the rest of the shells for another easy baked pasta dish that doesn't require stuffing, or deconstruct a batch of shells for another night.

The other advantage of baking dried shells is that the pasta will be much more flavorful than if you parboiled them. As the shells cook in the sauce, they'll absorb those flavors, whereas boiled pasta won't absorb much at all since it's already cooked when it goes into the pan. Not only will you save time and stress trying to stuff wet shells, but your casserole will actually taste a little more put together, so you'll have to give this method a try.