Make A Mini Sauce To Revitalize Leftover Tuna Noodle Casserole
Tuna casserole is a tried-and-true comfort dish for a reason. The combination of noodles, tuna, cheese, and plenty of creamy sauce has proved a winning one. But there's one catch with this dish — the leftovers can be on the dry side. This is the result of the absorbent pasta sucking up a surplus of the creamy sauce left in the casserole, making it a bit drier than your first serving. Still, this doesn't mean you're sentenced to a week of dreary leftovers.
Instead, you can rescue this casserole with a bit of homemade sauce. Like a revitalizing elixir, a new batch of sauce can transform the texture of the dry casserole into something decidedly more creamy. So where should you start in bringing this tip to your home cooking? Well, return to the original source of the sauce, your tuna casserole recipe, and cut that in half. Soon, you'll have the perfect mini sauce to stir in and soften your leftover casserole.
A dose of extra sauce to keep things creamy
To kick this tuna casserole spruce-up into high gear, take a look at the original recipe and begin halving the ingredients for your cheese sauce. This is oftentimes something like a béchamel sauce or a condensed soup-based sauce like cream of mushroom. Once you whip together this half sauce, you'll pour it over your leftover casserole and gently reheat it in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 45 minutes until heated through and the sauce has sunk in.
Of course, this trick works for more than just tuna casserole. If you want to pump up the sauciness in other noodle-based casseroles like your favorite baked ziti or tortellini bake, you can easily whip up a half tomato or pesto sauce and incorporate it back in. Just know you can always add a bit of homemade love back into the equation with this hack.