The ground beef is simmered with your favorite store-bought marinara sauce along with some extra seasonings and then add pasta that has been cooked until given along with some mozzarella and cream cheese and let it cook some more for an amazing clay pot baked spaghetti recipe that everyone in the family will love.
Slow cooker baked spaghetti
Spaghetti is a favorite in my house. Well, one of my favorites! I have strange kids that spaghetti isn’t their favorite, chicken nuggets are their favorite. What should a mom do?
My good friend asked a good question the other day “can I cook spaghetti in the slow cooker?” And my answer was “hmmmm. I don’t know.”
So I decided to try to find a way to cook the noodles without making them mushy. I wanted to try and see if I could cook the noodles in the sauce and how long it would take.
My first attempt was to see if I could cook the noodles in the sauce in the slow cooker. I put a jar of sauce in the slow cooker and then put my spaghetti noodles, put the slow cooker on low temperature, and let it cook. And cooking. And cooking. After 8 hours, I tried the noodles and some were cooked (the ones in the sauce) and some were not. Some seemed overcooked and well, this was a failure. I had to throw it away.
People of trial and error… Trial and error!
Rethinking this process, I decided to cook my sauce in the slow cooker and then add some noodles that were cooked, but not quite (al dente).
In cooking, al dente describes pasta and vegetables, rice or beans that are cooked to be firm to the bite. The etymology is Italian “to the tooth”. In contemporary Italian cuisine, the term identifies the ideal consistency for pasta and implies a short cooking time. Molto al dente is the culinary term for lightly undercooked pasta. Undercooked pasta is used in the first round of cooking when a pasta dish is to be cooked twice. The culinary term “al forno” is used for pasta dishes that are cooked twice. Pasta cooked al dente has a lower glycemic index than pasta that cooks soft. When cooking commercial pasta, the al dente phase occurs just after the white disappears from the pasta center.
Wikipedia
I added my
sauce in the slow cooker (along with some ground beef and spices), let it heat up, and then added my noodles. If you want to add some chopped vegetables, now would be the time to do so. Chopped green peppers, onions or mushrooms would be great in this dish. In addition to the noodles (friend suggested this, unlike the first friend), I added small pieces of cream cheese. And let that cook. I gave it a quick stir and added some mozzarella cheese (melted cheese is always good at spaghetti).
A couple of hours in total and after cooking some garlic bread and cheese, I had dinner.
And it was delicious… seriously!
One final note: you can keep the baked spaghetti in the slow cooker after you have finished cooking, lower the temperature to HOT. The noodles will continue to cook. And if you leave it there for more than an hour at WARM, your noodles will start to get mushy. I would suggest pulling baked spaghetti out of the clay pot and serving it from a serving plate.
No one likes soft noodles!
