The Absolute Best Italian Pasta Salad for Summer Picnics

[Music] you know about the food pyramid but do you know about bridget lancaster's picnic food pyramid we have at the apex cold fried chicken right underneath that it's potato salad and baked beans you have assorted cakes of course cornbread biscuits a few salads under that and then boom right at the bottom pasta salad everybody brings them to the picnics and everybody goes home with the leftovers because no one's eating them but keith's here and he has told me he's going to change my mind about pasta salads yeah could i bring that pasta salad up in your pyramid if the salad had tender pasta fresh flavorful ingredients and a potent dressing that kind of brought everything together rather than sitting at the bottom of the bowl sure but can you also get me a unicorn i'll work on the unicorn let's focus on the pasta salad today so we're going to actually start with a pasta which makes sense and we're going to start with a pound of fusilli pasta this corkscrew shape is perfect for pasta salad because it traps everything it's like pasta velcro so all those dressings and all those flavorful ingredients get caught in these little nooks and crannies for this pasta so i have four quarts of water here we'll just add our pasta and we want to add one tablespoon of salt because bland pasta in the pasta salad is well bland yes we want to go three minutes passed out that day so when the pasta cools down it's still going to be tender okay know it will depend on what brand of pasta you're using so we'll come back and taste this towards the end of cooking to make sure that we get it just right so while we pastas cook we're going to focus on our dressing now most dressings are kind of bland they fall to the bottom a lot of people use the bottled italian dressing we're not going to do that we're actually going to build the dressing and make sure that we have something really flavorful to start with right so here i have a quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil and i also have three cloves of minced garlic we're actually going to warm this up in the microwave we're going to bloom those flavors into an infused oil i'm just going to put a plate on this to make sure it's covered and doesn't splatter all over the microwave if we get it too hot so we're just going to go in the microwave for 30 to 60 seconds until it's bubbling and fragrant all right wow that smells quite strong oh it's bubbling yeah all those aromatics have infused into the oil and that will be the base for our dressing another problem with pasta salad dressings is that they're usually too thin so if you have a flavorful dressing and it's at the bottom of the bowl it's not doing any good no so we wanted to create a dressing that had some body to it so we went through some different variations and what we found is that we wanted to take some of the ingredients that you normally put in pasta salad and actually grind them up and make a dressing from those ingredients one ingredient that we found a lot was pepperoncini these things are great they're tart they're spicy so we're going to take a half cup of these we're going to take the stems off we'll take the seeds out and then we're going to actually process them in the food processor as the base of our dressing okay i'm just going to take these stems off first and then we'll reach in here and we can kind of pinch that core out there's not a lot of seeds here but you can get the majority of them out that's great but if you leave some in that's okay too it's not going to ruin anything we're going to process it up nice and fine okay in addition to our pepperoncini i'm going to add two tablespoons of capers again potent ingredient briny flavor it's going to be really great in our pasta salad okay i'm just going to pulse this 10 times until the pepperoncini and the capers are broken down and finely chopped okay that looks great you can see that they're nice and finely chopped i can smell it from over here pickle so we're gonna add two tablespoons of the pepperoncini liquid that they come in it's vinegar and a little bit of salt and also pepperoncini flavor so rather than using our wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar we're just going to use this instead very good two tablespoons and then we have our warm infused yes oil that we'll 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 okay you can see it looks almost like a pesto that we have going on here yeah it sure does really yummy pesto yeah so it's super concentrated super flavorful and it's actually going to work into those nooks and crannies and the fusilli and make sure that we have a nice flavorful dressing that doesn't fall at the bottom of the bowl great you got everything in teeny tiny pieces so it'll hook on to the velcro pasta okay so the pasta's been cooking i'm just going to give it a test here that's great so it's past al dente it's soft it's tender which is going to be perfect when we cool it so can i ask you to drain and rinse the pasta you sure can that's nice and cooled down and we want to make sure that we shake that really well we're going to use a nice big bowl today to make sure that we can toss all these ingredients in here evenly great i'm just going to add our thick dressing to this pasta you can see there's nothing in the bottom of the bowl right now so it's clung into that pasta and you're going to get that flavorful dressing in every bite so now we have our pasta let's look at our mixins and we weren't really interested in doing more cooking for this we didn't want to go out to the grill to grill vegetables or roast vegetables so we went to our pantry to find a bunch of nice flavorful ingredients so first up is a half cup of sun-dried tomatoes that have been thinly sliced a nice bright flavor that these will add and a little bit of chew yep they're acidic they're sweet and they're chewy nice next up i have a half cup of kalamata olives that we've cut into quarters again big flavor high impact ingredients you know briny salty flavors i also have two cups of baby or arugula we were missing kind of a 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 we all we have is that quarter cup of olive oil we're looking for a little bit more richness and we're going to have a bunch of bold ingredients in there and the fresh mozzarella gave us a nice fresh creamy flavor without really dominating like a pecorino water or parmesan so now i have to do a little bit more knife work 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 rather than going to the deli and buying those slices the deli slices will work but you want to make sure that you're getting a fairly thick slice so you have a nice substantial dice in here and the dried salami just has so much more flavor than the deli salami it does much more flavor so you know we're looking for a genoa salami or soprasada which do have more flavor than those jelly slices we want a 3 8 inch dice here and that might sound a little finicky but it was the perfect kind of size for our salad too small and it kind of fell to the bottom too big and then you're kind of chewing on a big piece of salami nobody wants that okay let's transfer use our bench scraper to transfer this over easily you are not skimping on the additions either no this this is hearty in flavor and texture so i have more pepperoncini we have that in our dressing but we wanted a little bit more this time we're going to add it in slices rather than processing it so same drill here i'm just going to take the top off take the core out so i'm starting with a half cup here and i'm going to just slice these 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 it is we're looking for a cup of chopped basil here so again this is like the arugula it's going to add flavor but it's also going to add freshness and color i'm just going to chop this up basil bruises very easily especially as it sits after you chop it it's a good idea to cut it at the last minute yes same thing with the arugula too you can make this pasta salad in advance after two or three days but with the greens the arugula and the basil you want to add them at the last minute oh that smells so good okay just gonna toss this really well that is beautiful okay one last thing i'm gonna do before we eat i'm just gonna taste this he's he's thinking about it i'm thinking about it it's good i'm gonna add a little bit more salt and a healthy dose of pepper here okay it looks great i gotta admit it tastes great this is looking good it's climbing up your pyramid well we'll see i'll see okay so i'm just gonna transfer this into a prettier bowl i just want you to notice that there's no dressing in the bottom of this bowl no there is not all in the pasta clinging to the velcro fusilli right yeah okay serving for you make sure i get a little bit of everything in here is this going to climb onto the pyramid you will has tons of flavor in them the anchovy capers pepperoncini yeah beautiful you can see the toppings and the pasta they're all mixed together everything didn't make a big dive for the bottom of the bowl and the pasta is firm but tender and i love the little bits of mozzarella in there too they add such a beautiful creamy texture of all the pasta salads this has definitely reached the apex yeah this is a pasta salad i'm proud to bring to a picnic you should be proud for a pasta salad you'll be proud to take to a picnic cook you silly until very tender then microwave oil anchovies and garlic until sizzling process with pepperoncini and cabers then toss with the pasta finish with salami olives cheese and herbs and of course serve from our test kitchen to your kitchen a surefire flavor packed italian pasta salad you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season along with our tastings testings and select episodes on our website americastestkitchen.com it's it's gone shoveling it in keith thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can 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 i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 653,796

Keywords: pasta salad, italian pasta salad, cooking, summer cooking, cooks illustrated, americas test kitchen

Id: dYofVt4kAzA

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020