Cheesy Taco Stuffed Shells
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Cheesy Taco Stuffed Shells made with jumbo pasta shells, salsa, cheese and taco meat are the perfect EASY weeknight meal that you can prepare ahead of time too!
Taco Stuffed Shells are an easy dinner of stuffed jumbo pasta shells with ground beef. With just the addition of taco seasoning, salsa and cheese your family will be asking for this dish to go in your regular rotation. This is the XL take on my super popular Cheesy Taco Pasta!
I love using either my Guapo’s Famous Fresh Pico de Gallo in this recipe or incredibly easy, store bought jarred salsa. You can also swap out the salsa in this recipe in a 1 to 1 ratio with my favorite Homemade QUICK Enchilada Sauce to make them taco stuffed shells with enchilada sauce.
If you’re looking for alternate to the shredded cheese or to mix things up a little you can absolutely make the taco stuffed shells with velveeta or nacho cheese as well. Even better you could just double the shredded cheddar cheese and have the ultimate cheesy taco stuffed shells.
Or if you want something a bit different you can also make my Mexican Stuffed Peppers with all the taco flavors but none of the pasta!
LOOKING FOR MORE GREAT CHEESY PASTA DISHES? LOOK NO FURTHER:
- Cheesy Taco Pasta
- Bacon Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper
- Pepperoni Pizza Hamburger Helper
- Philly Cheesesteak Hamburger Helper
- Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Bake
- Chicken Bacon Ranch Lasagna Roll Ups
Thinking of some other stuffed shells ideas?
- Pepperoni Pizza stuffed shells with marinara sauce, pepperoni and mozzarella.
- Chicken Bacon Ranch Stuffed Shells with the Cheddar Bacon Ranch Pinwheels filling and baked with alfredo sauce.
- Philly Cheesesteak stuffed shells with the Philly Cheese Steak Sloppy Joes filling but with double the cheese!
- Chicken Parmesan Stuffed Shells with chicken nuggets, marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese and Parmesan cheese.
MY OTHER RECIPESTools Used in the making of these Taco Stuffed Shells:
Jumbo Pasta Shells: Make sure you buy these and not the large ones. Also, husbands may inadvertently think “large” is the right size…not saying mine did that! 😉
Jarred Salsa: Cuts the prep time down to just a couple of minutes and the flavors are still outstanding.
Taco Seasoning: I’ve use my homemade taco seasoning recipe if you’d prefer not to use a packet. This is the packet I’d recommend if not using homemade.
Taco Stuffed Shells
Ingredients
- 12 ounces jumbo pasta shells
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1 packet taco seasoning
- 2/3 cup of water
- 1 1/2 cups jarred salsa divided
- 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese divided
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
- Cook the pasta shells according to the directions on the box and drain.
- Add the ground beef to the pan and brown well.
- Drain the fat.
- Add the taco seasoning and water, stir and cook until water is gone.
- Stir in 1 cup salsa and 3/4 cup cheese.
- Scoop into the jumbo pasta shells and top with the remaining salsa and cheese.
- Bake in a covered pan for 15 minutes.
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Oh my gosh, these have my mouth watering – I want a big serving right now!
This is such a great dinner idea! And I love how easy this is to make too. 🙂
This pasta looks perfect even for a Sunday dinner!
Thanks Catalina!
Sooo easy to make! Made me look like I actually knew what I was doing in the kitchen! I? made my test batch for me and my friend as written above. But I? wanted to cook this for my whole family and I have a large family so I doubled the Recipe. I ended up with extra shells with no stuffing. But it worked out because I didn’t have to use any torn shells. But I added 1/3 cup of sour cream in the meat the second time I cooked it. It made it a little more difficult to stuff the shells because it was a little more runny. But it tasted amazing!
Thanks for dropping by to let me know! I’m so glad you guys enjoyed it!
I’m currently making this, only I am changing/adding some stuff to it. My family doesn’t care for salsa (I do!) so instead of adding salsa or tomato, I am making this with mild cheddar cheese with a velveeta cheese sauce to cover each of the shells. It looks simple enough to make, and I do believe this will be a hit at our home!
This looks amazing. I’m going to give it a try. If you were to make this in advance would you freeze it? and if so how would you bake it to reheat. This looks like a great alternative to lasagna for new moms or those friends you want to help out in a hard time.
What a great idea! This one might be a bit trickier to make ahead and freeze but if I were doing it, I would make it up to step 6 and then freeze. When delivering it to someone, I would give them a bag of cheese and jar of salsa with instructions on how to finish. Tell them to pour the salsa over the frozen shells and bake for 25 minutes, then top with the cheese and bake an additional 5 min. Hopefully this makes sense.
Fantastic !
These were surprisingly good. Much better than I expected from the listed ingredients. It’s a keeper for us and will be made frequently. Thank you, Sabrina.
So glad you enjoyed it Donna!
My family loved this!!!!I made this dish on Saturday and they are already asking for an instant replay!Problem: I intend to double the recipe. There was only enough to stuff half of the shells.The ” save for later” that I poured over the entre dish was too skimpy too, so next time I plan to use two pounds of ground beef (grass fed) and two jars of the pico salsa that I used. That tasted so good!
Yay!!