The Absolute Best Italian Pasta Salad for Summer Picnics

You know the food pyramid, but do you know about the Bridget Lancaster Picnic Food Pyramid? We have at the top cold fried chicken right below, which is potato

salad

and baked beans, it has a variety of pastries of course, cornbread biscuits, some

salad

s below that and then boom, of course. at the bottom

pasta

salad, everyone takes them to

picnics

and everyone goes home with the leftovers because no one eats them, but Keith is here and he told me that he's going to change his mind about

pasta

salads. Yes, I could move that pasta salad up your pyramid if the salad had tender pasta, fresh, flavorful ingredients, and a potent dressing that tied everything together instead of sitting at the bottom of the bowl, but can you also bring me a unicorn?

I'll work on the unicorn, let's focus on the pasta. salad today so we're going to start with a pasta that makes sense and we're going to start with a pound of fusilli pasta. This corkscrew shape is perfect for pasta salad because it catches everything. It's like Velcro pasta, so all those toppings and all those tasty ingredients get trapped in these little nooks and crannies of this pasta, so I have four liters of water here. We're just going to add our pasta and we want to add a tablespoon of salt because the soft pasta in the pasta salad is really soft, yeah.

We want to spend three minutes that day so that when the pasta cools it is still tender. Okay, you know, it will depend on what brand of pasta you're using, so we'll go back and try this towards the end of cooking. to make sure it's good, so while we're cooking the pasta we're going to focus on our dressing. Now most dressings are a little bland and fall to the bottom. Many people use bottled Italian dressing. We are not going to do it. Let's do that, we're actually going to make the dressing and make sure we have something really tasty to start with, so here I have a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil and I also have three cloves of minced garlic.

To microwave this, we're going to bloom those flavors in an infused oil. I'm just going to put a plate on top of this to make sure it's covered and doesn't splatter all over the microwave if you heat it up too much. so we're going to pop it in the microwave for 30 to 60 seconds until it's bubbling and fragrant okay it smells pretty strong oh it's bubbling yeah all those aromatics have been infused into the oil and that's going to be the base for our dressing. The problem with pasta salad dressings is that they're usually too thin, so if you have a savory dressing and it's at the bottom of the bowl, it's no good, so we wanted to create a dressing that had some body to it, so We went through a few different variations and what we found is that we wanted to take some of the ingredients that you normally put in pasta salad and grind them up and make a dressing with those ingredients.

One ingredient we found a lot was pepperoncini, these things are great. They're sour, they're spicy, so we're going to take a half cup of these, remove the stems, remove the seeds, and then process them in the food processor. as the base of our dressing, okay, first I'm going to remove these stems and then we'll reach in here and we can pinch that core. There aren't many seeds here, but you can get most of them. That's great, but if you leave a little bit, that's fine too, it won't ruin anything, we'll process it nice and good, in addition to our pepperoncini, I'll add two tablespoons of capers again, potent ingredient, salty flavor. it's going to look really great in our pasta salad, okay, I'm just going to pulse this 10 times until the pepperoncini and capers are crumbled and finely chopped, okay, it looks great, you can see they're nice and finely chopped.

Smell it from here, pickle, so we're going to add two tablespoons of the pepperoncini liquid that comes in vinegar and a little bit of salt and also pepperoncini flavor, so instead of using our wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar, we're just going to use this in instead, all right, two tablespoons and then we have our warm infused yes oil that we're going to put in here, so we have our infused oil and our pepperoncini liquid in there. I'm just going to process for 20 seconds until everything is incorporated. You can see it's almost like the pesto that we have here, yeah, it's a really delicious pesto for sure, yeah, so it's super concentrated, super flavorful and it's really going to work in those nooks and crannies and in the fusilli and it's going to make sure that we have a nice, flavorful dressing that doesn't fall to the bottom of the bowl.

Great, you have everything in tiny pieces so that it can be attached to the pasta with Velcro. Okay, the pasta has been cooking. I'm just going to do a test here. Great, it's al dente, it's soft, tender, which will be perfect when we cool it. Can I ask you to drain and rinse the pasta? Sure you can, it's fine and it's cooled down, and we want to make sure we really shake it. Well, today we're going to use a nice big bowl to make sure that we can add all of these ingredients in here evenly. Great, I'm just going to add our thick dressing to this pasta.

You can see that there is nothing at the bottom of the bowl. right now, it's stuck to that pasta and you're going to get that flavorful topping in every bite, so now that we have our pasta, let's look at our mixes and we weren't really interested in cooking any more for this, we didn't want to go out on the grill to roast vegetables. or roasting vegetables, so we went to our pantry to look for a bunch of nice, tasty ingredients, so first thing is half a cup of thinly sliced ​​sun-dried tomatoes, with a nice, bright flavor that I added and a little bit of chew , yes, they are sour, they are sweet and chewy, pleasant.

Next, I've got a half cup of kalamata olives that we've quartered again, big flavor, high impact ingredients, you know, salty, savory flavors. I also have two cups of baby arugula or arugula. We were missing some sort of salad element and that's where this arugula came in. Okay, so two cups of baby arugula and I also have eight ounces of fresh mozzarella cheese right now. All we have is that room. cup of olive oil we're looking for a little more richness and we're going to have a lot of bold ingredients in there and the fresh mozzarella gave us a nice fresh creamy flavor without really overpowering like the pecorino water or the parmesan so now I have to work a little bit more with the knife here, we have eight ounces of dried salami here and we like a small salami like this, we like the texture of it, we like the flavor of it instead of going to the deli and buying those slices.

Deli slices will work, but you want to make sure you get a fairly thick slice to have some substantial dice here and dry salami has a lot more flavor than deli salami, it has a lot more flavor, so you know. We're looking for a Genoa salami or soprasada that has more flavor than those jello slices. We want a 3 8 inch dice here and that may sound a little complicated, but it was the perfect size for our salad. Too small and friendly. of fell to the bottom too big and then you're chewing on a big chunk of salami, no one wants that, okay let's transfer, use our bench scraper to transfer this easily, you're not skimping on additions either, no, this is filling. flavor and texture, so I have more pepperoncini, we have it in our dressing, but this time we wanted a little more, we're going to add it in slices instead of processing it, so here I'm just going to remove the top. remove the core so I'm going to start with half a cup here and just cut them into thin rings okay one last ingredient and that's basil.

You can't have pasta salad without basil, that's a lot of basil, that's us. I'm looking for a cup of chopped basil here, so again, this is like arugula, it will add flavor but it will also add freshness and color. I'm just going to cut the bruises off the basil very easily, especially when it's placed behind you. chop it it's a good idea to cut it at the last minute yes the same with the arugula you can also make this pasta salad in advance after two or three days but with the vegetables the arugula and basil you want to add them at the end minute oh, that smells very okay, okay, I'm just going to throw this in nicely, that's beautiful, okay, one last thing I'm going to do before we eat, I'm just going to try this, he's thinking about it, I'm thinking about it, that's good.

I'm going to add a little more salt and a healthy dose of pepper. Well, it looks great. I must admit that it tastes very good. You can see it well. He is climbing your pyramid. Well we'll see. We'll see. Okay, so I'm just going to Transfer this to a nicer bowl. I just want you to notice that there is no dressing at the bottom of this bowl. No, there is not all the pasta attached to the fusilli with velcro. Yeah, okay, serving you, make sure you get a little bit of everything. here this is going to go up the pyramid, you'll have tons of flavor in them, the anchovies, the capers, the pepperoncini, yes beautiful, you can see the toppings and the pasta, they're all mixed together, it all didn't make much of a deep dive out of the bowl and the pasta is firm but tender and I also love the little bits of mozzarella in there, it adds such a beautiful creamy texture to all the pasta salads, this has definitely reached the pinnacle, yes this is a pasta salad that I am proud to bring. to a picnic you should be proud of a pasta salad that you will be proud to take to a picnic cook it until very tender, then microwave the anchovies with oil and garlic until sizzling, process with pepperoncini and cabers and then mix with pasta and finishes with salami, olives and cheese. and herbs and, of course, serve an Italian pasta salad full of foolproof flavor from our test kitchen to your kitchen.

You can get this recipe and all of this season's recipes along with our taste tests and select episodes on our website americastestkitchen.com. It's on Keith, thanks for watching America's Test Kitchen. What do you think about it? Well, leave a comment and tell us what recipes you're excited to make or just say hello. You can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later