A vegetarian bake featuring hollow pasta and crispy Parm topping

You could consider making this recipe just so you (or a dinner guest old enough to remember the 1960s Adam West campy superhero TV show) can say “Hole-y spaghetti, Batman!’

I don’t recall ever cooking with, or even dining on, bucatini, a sort of thick spaghetti extruded to put a hole in the middle. Indeed, I had to go to two stores to find it. But it became the talk of the table when I made this recently for my vegetarian sister while she visited our old homestead — owned by my brother now — in West Hazleton.

(Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve been using her increase in visits as reason to expand my vegetarian repertoire. I’m good with vegetable sides, but pretty limited in vegetarian entrees outside of pizza).

This time I dove into some cookbooks long in our kitchen but short on use (at least by me) and found “Bucatini with Tomatoes” in “The Food Lover’s Guide to Vegetarian Cooking.” It is simple, flavorful, adaptable and likely to surprise some thanks to the straw-like pasta with a name aptly derived from the Italian word for “hole”: Buco.

It was a hit, and it paired well with another recipe from the same book for garbanzo beans with sauteed garlic, herbs and a little Greek Yogurt added before serving (a future Test Kitchen article). A few suggestions from my experience:

The original recipe calls for adding olive oil to the water in which you cook the bucatini, while the package said to add salt and explicitly advised against adding oil. I added neither. If you want to arrange the noodles in a spiral in the casserole dish, a little oil might facilitate that. I made a small effort at this, and the pasta was already starting to stick together. Since you’re going to be cutting it into servings, the spiral is strictly for a visual pop when first served.

It calls for one pound (16 ounces) of pureed tomatoes. The can I bought was 15 ounces. I will almost surely increase the amount in the future, maybe to a pound and half, to get more sauce into the noodles.

Speaking of which: Multiple websites say the big boon of bucatini is that sauce can get in the noodle as well as on the outside, increasing flavor in every bite. The packaged directions encouraged doing a trick I increasingly employ with pasta and most sauces: Mixing the noodles and sauce before serving (while sauce is still in the pan and on the oven), so the pasta can absorb more of the flavor. This recipe calls for pouring the sauce on top and “prodding” the sauce into the noodles. That worked well enough, but in the future I’ll definitely try adding noodles to at least some of the sauce, even if that probably would make spiraling the noodles in the casserole dish more difficult.

And regular readers can probably guess my last bit of advice: Don’t skimp on the cheese. I used Parmesan and grated considerably more than the 3 ounces called for (probably twice as much), completely coating the the casserole and creating a nice, crisp and golden brown topping. In the future, I’ll probably mix some cheese in with the pasta and sauce, and still coat the top.

It’s easy to see tailoring this to fit tastes: more cheese, more garlic, more sauce, more spice, even some browned ground meat or other protein. So look for some bucatini (I was going to use spaghetti until MT suggested stopping at the Weis Supermarket in Mountain Top on the way to Hazleton) and see how filling the hollow pasta can be.

Dobru Chut!

Bucatini with Tomatoes (The Food Lover’s Guide to Vegetarian Cooking)

12 ounces dried bucatini (long hollow pasta tubes)

dash of olive oil

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 onion, minced

1 pound (16 ounces) pureed tomatoes

4 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

salt and freshly ground pepper

butter for baking dish

3 ounces freshly shredded Parmesan (or Pecorino) cheese

Bring a large pot of water to boil, add olive oil (I skipped this) and cook bucatini according to directions, about 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Preheat oven to 400° Butter bottom and sides of a casserole (9 inch square or similar round) dish.

Place the garlic, onion, tomatoes, basil and salt and pepper in a large frying pan. Heat until simmering, then cook for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

arrange the bucatini in the dish, curling it around to fit the dish if you want to be fancy, making sure it is tightly packed. Spoon the tomato mixture over the top, prodding the pasta to ensure the sauce sinks to the bottom the the dish. Sprinkle with cheese. Bake 25-20 minutes or until crisp and golden brown. If in a round dish, cut in wedges to serve, like a pie.