Elevate Your Pasta Salad Game This Summer With These Tips

The gap between a good pasta salad and a bad one is both small and profound. When it’s good, it’s the star of the show – but when this dish goes south, it really tanks: Mushy, flavorless, lacking in any variety in terms of both texture and taste, and visually unappealing. Annoyingly, producing the latter can be more common than the former.

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It doesn’t have to be this way, folks! Pasta salads live and die by their ingredients and the technique used to make them, and there are some key places where people go wrong. With these tips, you won’t do the same. 

Pick The Right Pasta

This one sounds obvious, but sadly, it’s also something that a lot of people fail to do. The right pasta shape makes all the difference in a pasta salad: You want it to have enough bite, the ability to hold your dressing, and have enough presence without being too big and cumbersome. 

In my humble opinion, fusilli, rotini, and farfalle are the sweet spots when it comes to pasta salad. Their shapes hold dressing like no one’s business, they’re not too big or too small, and (when cooked right) their thicker parts maintain a good chew. Ridged penne, conchiglie, and mezzi rigatoni are also good choices. On the flip side, regular rigatoni can sometimes feel too chunky, while macaroni can be a bit small for the toothsome quality you want. Spaghetti and angel hair pasta, meanwhile, won’t hold your dressing properly. 

Get Your Cooking Times Right

Contrary to what feels intuitive, you have to cook your pasta for a little longer than you think when using it in a pasta salad. If you’ve spent your whole life going for an al dente texture, this will seem a bit alien – but otherwise, your pasta will firm up too much as it cools, and you’ll be left with a chalky bite. So, go for 1-2 minutes more than what your package instructions indicate. Oh, and don’t rinse it when you drain it. 

Dress Warm…

What’s that you say? Don’t rinse it? Yes, because when you do, you get rid of all the starch on the outside and cool down your pasta – and you need that starch and that warmth. The starch on your pasta will help your dressing adhere to it, while the warmth will help the dressing soak into your noodles a little, instead of just sitting on top of them.

So, once you’ve drained your pasta, give it a good shake to get rid of any excess water, and then dump it all in a bowl. Add your salad dressing pretty much immediately, stir well, and then leave it to soak it all up. 

…And Dress Twice

Your work’s not over yet, people! Once your pasta and dressing have cooled, you can then add your additional ingredients (think about texture here: You want crunch, softness, and squidge, all in one package). Before you serve it, though, make sure you hit it with some more dressing. 

Why? Because as pasta salad cools and the dressing absorbs, it can lose a fair bit of moisture – and the flavor can get pretty dull. Dressing it again will reintroduce both of those things and give it that pop you’re looking for. Hey presto: Perfect pasta salad.