A deeply comforting, creamy baked jumbo pasta for weeknights

For luxurious but easy baked shells, skip the stuffing

There are many different kinds of pasta shapes, but none stick out to me as much as the jumbo shell. First, it’s decidedly shaped like its name, a shell — full-figured, yet hollow. Despite being made from the grain of the land, just looking at them could transport you to some idyllic spiaggia where pasta washes in with the tide. They’re at the same time chic and luxurious; bold, goofy and fun.

Called conchiglioni in Italian, large shells are perfect for stuffing with cheese, greens, sausage or even squash. They’re often baked in the oven so the stuffing becomes one with the shell’s interior, and the top browns and crisps. It’s a deeply comforting and gorgeous meal, but too laborious for most nights of the week.

In this week’s recipe, I take all the best features of a stuffed and baked shell pasta — I just do not stuff them. Instead I bathe the shells in an incredibly rich tomato sauce and the usual stuffing fixings like cheese (big dollops of ricotta here) and greens (silky chard, also here) are just part of the overall bath.

Besides the pot of water for cooking the pasta, I simmer the sauce and bake the shells in one pan, making this almost a one pan meal — something your dishwasher will appreciate. As the shells bake, they get crispy-crunchy around the edges, and so do the bits of chard that poke out of the garlicky tomato sauce. The ricotta softens and becomes a creamy contrast to the pungent sauce. The overall vibe is ease, and sure, the shells are not stuffed, but they’re full of flavor.

Christian Reynoso/The Chronicle Skip the laborious stuffing process with this recipe for big baked pasta shells with ricotta and chard and bathed with a rich tomato sauce.