The meatball sub is a formidable sandwich. Maybe even so formidable that it’s kind of hard to eat… you need A LOT of napkins. But its messiness doesn’t make it any less delicious. I mean, there’s meatballs, and chewy bread, and tangy red sauce, and cheese… It’s almost like those ingredients would work well together in pretty much any application. So how about a casserole!

As suspected, a Meatball Sub Casserole works beautifully — just think of it like a giant open face meatball sub, one that you get to share with all your friends.

We’re keeping things easy here. This isn’t a laborious from-scratch recipe; this is a throw-it-together kind of dinner. So we’re using pre-made frozen meatballs, and pre-made marinara sauce, and pre-made bread (well, Texas Toast, more on that in a minute), and then some cheese and a few seasonings. Simple stuff.

Now, the Texas Toast. You could put your ingredients on a basic bread roll. But why wouldn’t you want them on buttery, garlicky, irresistible Texas Toast? Exactly.

So you take that Texas Toast and bake it however the package tells you to. Then you line a baking dish with those slices and worry about the cheesiness of this project for a moment. Take a saucepan and place it over low heat and then melt the ricotta and cream cheese together in that pan before you stir in some Italian seasoning and salt and pepper. Pour that alllllll over the bread. I mean Texas Toast.

Then you’re going to stir the meatballs into the marinara and spoon them over the cheese sauce layer. Make sure to spoon all that sauce over the top. You’re eating this with a fork, so you don’t have to think about the messiness so much.

That wasn’t quite enough cheese, so give it a blanket of mozzarella before you pop it into the oven for just about thirty minutes until it’s nice and bubbly.

See? Wasn’t that easy? This is hearty stuff and it feeds a crowd, but that crowd will be incredibly happy about it, I promise. It’s just hard to resist this kind of comfort in a baking dish!