Giada De Laurentiis' Pasta Ponza | Giada At Home | Food Network

So I'm having two cups of yellow cherry tomatoes and two cups of red cherry tomatoes for my pasta ponza. It's like a tomato gratin that is baked in the oven and then tossed with ziti pasta and then some tangy capers, some full-bodied you know really sharp pecorino romano cheese and then this nice crispy crumble topping on top which is really good. So I've already buttered my 8x8 baking dish just so the tomatoes don't stick to the bottom and we can get it out nicely and easily and we want to season it with some salt. A little salt, a little pepper all over the top there. Now a friend of my Aunt Rafi's has a house in Ponza and she's actually the one that first made this for us. So Rafi and I named it pasta ponza just because she made it there and she grows a lot of tomatoes on her terrace and I love making this all year round especially because it's so easy to make. Pop it in the oven, cook up some pasta, toss it all together and you're done. A little bit of extra virgin olive oil and see just the colors on their own with the tangy capers inside every bite is succulent and juicy. Make sure that you get a nice even layer of all the tomatoes and to get that nice crispy kind of crumble on top I take a half a cup of store-bought seasoned bread crumbs and I just sprinkle it right on top. Although it looks like it's a lot of bread crumbs the tomatoes kind of suck it up and then it becomes nice and crispy on top just like that. And I add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil right over the top. So we're going to bake it at 375 degrees for 30 minutes until you get a nice golden crust on top. I need the Pecorino Romano. I love this cheese. It's a little bit saltier than Parmesan cheese but it's also a little bit softer too and butterier. So we need one and a quarter cups. Okay just gonna move this right there and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna toss the cheese with the cooked ziti before we add the tomatoes to it. So now that the water is boiling you want to season the pasta get it nice and flavorful and remember this is where the seasoning starts in the water so you want to add a nice handful of salt and really get that pasta well seasoned. And today I'm going to use these ziti. Now ziti they look very similar to penne and they're a little tube pasta and they have these little lines right on them so that the sauce sticks to the pasta. So we're gonna throw this in here. There we go. And then give it a minute to cook. So my pasta is al dente and the first thing I want to do is add the Pecorino Romano that I grated earlier. That oh they smell so good and they have a nice golden crust on top. And just kind of toss them right in there. So we just want to give it a nice toss. Now to finish it all off some flat leaf Italian parsley that we chopped earlier. Give it a little color a little freshness and look how beautiful that looks. You can't beat this.