Shaping Up Bacon-Cheeseburger Pasta Bake

Welcome to Pasta Week! We’re celebrating the release of Pasta Revolution, our newest cookbook, and using our noodle like never before. See this week’s full lineup of recipes, giveaways, and events.

The Baseline

At first glance, this dish should be the definition of crowd-pleasing: a casserole pan teeming with curly noodles, tender ground beef, tangy pickles, and salty bacon, all held together with American cheese and a sweet tomato sauce. A combination of your favorite fast-food guilty pleasure and a weeknight pasta dinner—what could top that?

Element of Distress

Talk about wasted potential. These all-star ingredients, which show so much promise in other applications, actually produce a goopy mess with chewy meat pellets and mushy pasta. Most times, we’d rather hit the drive-thru than waste our time preparing the dish.

Line of Attack

For a recipe that was big on flavor but short on prep time, we’d start with convenience products—like canned tomato sauce—and augment them with spices and seasonings. We’d also find a way to coordinate the different cooking times for different ingredients.