Johnny Marzetti: The Ohio Beef and Noodle Casserole, Done Properly

If you grew up anywhere between Cleveland and Indianapolis you have eaten Johnny Marzetti, probably out of a hotel pan at a church supper, and you may not have known it had a name. Beef, macaroni, tomato sauce, a cheddar lid. It is the plainest possible description of a dish and it is also, done carelessly, one of the dullest things you can put in an oven.

The careless version has a specific taste: flat and faintly sweet, tomato sauce with beef suspended in it rather than beef sauce. That happens when the beef gets cooked in liquid instead of browned in fat, which is what a crowded pot on medium heat amounts to.

The fix is a single pot and some patience with it. Brown the meat in the Dutch oven you are going to build the sauce in, pour the fat off but leave the browned film on the bottom, and then dissolve that film into the tomatoes. Everything that makes this dish worth making is in that film.

Ingredients

A 9×13 dish or a 5-quart braiser, which is how I usually bake it so there is one less thing to wash. Eight to ten servings.

For the Sauce

• 1 1/2 pounds ground beef, 80/20
• 1/2 pound ground pork
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 1 green bell pepper, diced
• 8 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
• 1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

For the Casserole

• 1 pound elbow macaroni
• 10 ounces sharp cheddar, grated from a block (about 2 1/2 cups)
• 4 ounces mild cheddar or Monterey Jack, grated (about 1 cup)

How to Make It

Prep: 55 minutes  |  Bake: 30 minutes  |  Serves: 8 to 10

1. Set a 5- or 6-quart Dutch oven over medium-high heat for 4 minutes. Add the beef in two batches — half a pound to a pound at a time, pressed into a flat layer — and let each batch sit untouched for 4 minutes before you break it up and give it 3 more. Move each batch to a colander set over a bowl. Brown the pork the same way.
2. Pour the fat out of the pot but do not wash or scrub it. There will be a dark brown film welded to the bottom. That is the point of this whole recipe. Let the drained meat sit in the colander while you deal with the vegetables.
3. Return 1 tablespoon of the rendered fat to the pot, lower the heat to medium, and add the onion, bell pepper, and mushrooms all at once. Cook 10 minutes, stirring now and then. The vegetables release water, and that water is what lifts the fond off the bottom — scrape at it with a wooden spoon as it loosens.
4. Add the garlic for 1 minute, then the tomato paste, and stir it around the hot pot for 2 minutes until it darkens. Add the crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, oregano, basil, red pepper flakes, bay leaf, salt, and pepper, and scrape the bottom of the pot clean one more time.
5. Stir the drained beef and pork back in and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes. It should thicken to the point where a spoon dragged across the bottom leaves a trail that fills in slowly. Fish out the bay leaf and taste for salt now, before the pasta arrives to blunt everything.
6. Meanwhile, boil the macaroni in well-salted water for two minutes less than the shortest time on the box. Drain it but do not rinse it. Fold it into the sauce along with 1 cup of the sharp cheddar.
7. Scrape it all into a buttered 9×13 dish, or leave it in the braiser if yours is oven-safe and wide enough. Top with the remaining sharp cheddar and the mild cheddar. Bake at 350°F for 30 minutes, until the surface is bubbling and blistered brown in spots.
8. Rest it 10 minutes. This is not optional with a pound of pasta in the dish — straight out of the oven it is loose, and after ten minutes it holds a square.

Can You Make It the Night Before?

If you are assembling a day ahead, boil the macaroni three minutes short instead of two and stir an extra 1/2 cup of tomato sauce or water into the mixture. Both adjustments are compensating for the same thing, which is overnight absorption.

From the refrigerator: 45 minutes on the counter, then 40 minutes in the oven instead of 30. A cold, dense 9×13 of pasta is one of the slower things to heat through, and the cheese on top will be browned long before the middle is hot if you go straight from fridge to oven.

The sauce freezes beautifully for three months on its own and is worth making in a double batch for exactly that reason. The assembled casserole freezes acceptably — the pasta comes back a little soft but the dish is recognizably itself. Thaw overnight in the refrigerator rather than baking from frozen.

Where Johnny Marzetti Came From

The dish traces back to Marzetti’s, a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, near the Ohio State campus, run by Teresa Marzetti, an Italian immigrant who opened it in the 1890s. The casserole is named for her brother-in-law Johnny, and by most accounts it appeared on the menu in the 1920s. The family’s food business outlasted the restaurant: the salad dressings still sold under the Marzetti name grew out of it.

What happened next is the more interesting part. The dish escaped the restaurant and became institutional food — school cafeterias, church basements, Grange halls, community cookbooks across Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. That is why the name survives in some families and not others, and why no two people from the Midwest describe it quite the same way. Some versions use egg noodles, some use mushrooms, some add a layer of cheese in the middle, and a lot of them lean on canned tomato soup.

I keep the mushrooms and the green pepper because they are in most of the older versions I have seen, and because together they do real work: between them they release enough liquid to lift the fond off the pot, which is the step the canned-soup versions lost.

Browning Four Half-Pounds Instead of Two Pounds

Two pounds of meat is a lot to brown, and the temptation with a deep Dutch oven is to put it all in at once because it fits. It fits and it does not brown. A Dutch oven has a smaller cooking surface than a skillet of the same capacity and tall sides that trap steam, so a full pot of ground meat sits in its own moisture and poaches.

Small batches, pressed flat, is slower and it is also the difference between this tasting like a restaurant dish and tasting like cafeteria food. I do four rounds: three of beef, one of pork. Each one is seven minutes, four of them untouched, and I use that time to chop the vegetables.

You will notice the pork browns differently — it goes pale golden rather than deep brown, and it renders faster. That is normal. It is contributing fat and a softer texture rather than crust.

Questions People Ask

What is the difference between Johnny Marzetti and American goulash?

Very little in practice, and the names are regional more than anything. Johnny Marzetti is the Ohio name and is usually baked with cheese on top; American goulash is more often finished entirely on the stovetop and left uncheesed. Both are beef, macaroni, and tomato. If someone tells you one has paprika and the other does not, that varies family to family.

Can I use egg noodles instead of macaroni?

Yes, and some older versions call for exactly that. Wide egg noodles give you a softer, richer dish, and they need an extra minute of care: cook them three minutes short rather than two, because they are more absorbent than durum macaroni and will go past soft during a 30-minute bake.

Why does my casserole taste flat even with plenty of salt?

Usually because the meat was never browned, so there is no savory base and salt is the only thing carrying it. The other common cause is a sauce that never got a proper reduction — 15 minutes uncovered concentrates it, and skipping that leaves you with canned tomato flavor diluted across a pound of pasta.

Do I have to bake it at all?

No, and plenty of people do not. Stirred together on the stovetop it is dinner in the same amount of time minus thirty minutes. What the oven buys you is the browned cheese lid and a firmer set that cuts into squares, which is why this is a potluck dish rather than a weeknight skillet.

How do I keep the cheese on top from going greasy?

Grate it from a block, mix a milder cheese in with the sharp cheddar, and keep the oven at 350°F rather than higher. Cheddar past about 375°F breaks and releases oil, and the drier and sharper the cheddar, the lower the temperature at which that happens.