The Perfect Picnic Pasta Salad - Food Wishes

[Music] hello this is chef john from foodwishes.com with perfect picnic pasta salad that's right the pasta salad is almost always the most disappointing side dish at the picnic or cookout but in this video i'm going to show you a few simple tricks to turn what is usually a phoned in afterthought into something you could enjoy as a meal all by itself not that you should since this is the perfect side for some grilled meats but if you had to you could and to get started we're going to cover the first thing that makes for a great pasta salad and that would be a large quantity of a very high quality perfectly emulsified vinaigrette which will begin with a few generous spoons of dijon mustard and then to that we're going to add two different vinegars starting with the very sharp and flavorful apple cider vinegar plus the equally flavorful but milder and less acidic rice vinegar and then we'll go ahead and season that up a little pinch of salt some sugar and just for the heck of it a few shakes a cayenne and once we have all that together we'll go ahead and grab our whisk and give this a quick mix before we add our oil and by the way if you turn this video off because you don't like mustard you really should turn it back on since our final product is not going to taste like a mustard dressing it is just going to taste like a delicious dressing and that's it once we whisk that for about half a minute we can start whisking in our oil starting very slowly at first okay we're just drizzling in like a teaspoon at a time and we'll continue with those small additions until we can tell it's starting to emulsify and how we'll know that is the texture will start to get thick which means the oil is being suspended in the vinegar versus stain separate where if you stop whisking in just like a minute it would separate into the two components again all right a properly mixed dressing is going to stay thick and rich and beautiful looking even after like hours but anyway once our vinaigrette starts to thicken up we can get a little more aggressive with our oil oh unless you say for the sake of argument you have a muscle spasm in your arm and you accidentally splash in too much oil do not panic just relax and simply just keep whisking but on one side of the bowl just mixing that probably too much oil in little by little until eventually it disappears at which point you are ready to add some more and you'll see the more oil you add in the thicker your vinaigrette's going to get and yes if you want to do this in a blender go ahead but then you have to clean a blender and i don't plus i get to tell people i worked out today and besides a perfectly emulsified vinaigrette the other secret here is making a very large amount all right for a pound of pasta i want at least a cup and a half a dressing which sounds like a crazy amount but it's not that is what you need and then the last step here once we're very happy with the viscosity of our vinaigrette is we'll go ahead and whisk in a whole bunch of freshly chopped herbs and of course we will list these in the ingredient list but i'm using just about everything tarragon dill parsley chives just to name a few and that's it our pasta salad dressing is done but before we move on to the rest of the salad let's go ahead and remove about half of that vinaigrette from the bowl since i like to mix some into the hot pasta and then we will finish the salad with the rest later and once that's out we can move on to the next most important factor in making a perfect pasta salad making sure the pasta is perfect which first of all means cooking it in properly salted water okay that water should actually taste like salt water and then once that's boiling we will add the pasta of our choice which for me is going to be a fusilli bukkati which is absolutely perfect for grabbing onto the vegetables and the dressing but any short similarly open pasta will work besides cooking this in well salted water and choosing the right shape the most important tip here is not to undercook your pasta right so many pasta salad recipes say to undercook the pasta for a minute or two which to me is a huge mistake so i'm cooking this stuff all the way until it's tender and then while we're waiting for that to cook let me share another thing i think makes for a great pasta salad and that would be including a combination of cooked and raw vegetables and for this salad for the cooked veggies i'm going to go with some sliced snow peas some sliced carrots some fairly small english peas and some broccoli flowers which is often sold as broccolini but anyway what i like to do since i have some boiling salted water on the stove right now is go ahead and stir this into my pasta about two minutes before it's done and that way i can just drain everything at once and it's actually a pretty easy way to do things and yes it would be more exact to cook these vegetables separately since they will have slightly different cooking times but you know what i don't care i'm making pasta salad let's just do it all at once and take our chances and that's it once our pasta is perfectly cooked and our veggies have cooked for a couple minutes we'll go ahead and drain this but we will not under any circumstances rinse this right just drain it very well and then add it unrinsed and piping hot right into that dressing in the bowl at which point we'll take our spatula and give this a thorough mixing and by tossing this hot pasta in the vinegar at this point i really do think it soaks in all those flavors much better and the final product is going to be significantly more flavorful and what we want to do here after the initial spatulation is let it sit for a few minutes and then give it another toss and we will do that like four or five times until our cellar cools down to somewhere between barely warm and room temperature and by the way please take a very good look at those beautiful bright green veggies since that is not gonna last okay when you toss blanched vegetables with an acidic vinaigrette like this that nice color is going to fade quickly but we don't care or at least i don't care because not only do i want the vegetables absorbing the flavor of the vinaigrette i want the vinaigrette and the pasta absorbing the flavor of those cooked vegetables and for that i will sacrifice a little bit of visual attractiveness any time besides after we do the next step i don't think anyone's going to notice and that's because once our salad cools down we're going to go ahead and toss in a whole bunch of beautiful fresh colorful raw vegetables including an array of diced peppers and i'm using some nice colorful sweet bells i also like to toss in a whole bunch of sliced cherry tomatoes and then we'll also if we want to toss in a little bit of diced onion and i went with some red and green then i'm also going to toss in a couple big pinches of salt which of course we will taste and adjust for later but i know i'm going to need at least that much and then last but not least we will add the rest of our reserved vinaigrette and then we'll grab our spatula and give this a final toss before we wrap it up and pop it in the fridge until it's thoroughly chilled all right you can serve this now but it will be so much better if you don't and you give it a little bit of time in the fridge for all these ingredients to get acquainted okay i don't think i've ever been to a party that was awesome right when it started okay it takes a little while to rev up and a pasta salad is exactly the same way and that's it once that's chilled in the fridge for an hour or two we can go ahead and pull it out and we'll give it the old toss and taste mostly checking for salt and of course you will adjust as you see fit and then once we're happy with that we'll transfer it in some kind of serving vessel and we'll go ahead and garnish the top if we want which i'm going to do with some more of the fresh herbs i used in my dressing including some freshly picked dill some freshly sliced chives and then believe it or not some time flowers which you have to pretty much grow your own time to get which you really should since they look like this and that's it what i consider the perfect picnic pasta salad is ready to enjoy and that my friends was just tremendous and even though it really doesn't look like it at this point that crazy amount of dressing we use really paid off okay unlike 95 percent of the other pasta salads out there this one explodes with flavor in every bite and yes of course you can use all raw vegetables here but to me one of the keys is having that combination of soft tender sweet vegetables combined with those crisp raw fresh vegetables all right to me that's one of the things that makes this kind of salad so superior and by the way the technique i showed here as far as how to make the dressing and how to mix it in that is going to work no matter what kind of vinegars you use so if you'd rather use a wine vinegar or some balsamic or a combination go ahead i mean you are after all the joan jet of your vinaigrette so as usual feel free to tweak and adjust this to your tastes oh and in case you're wondering the difference between a pasta salad and a picnic pasta salad is it a picnic pasta salad traditionally has vinaigrette instead of a mayonnaise or egg based dressing since theoretically that's going to keep better and be safer out in the sun for like five hours but because of vinaigrette based dressing's usually not as rich and decadent these kind of cells just don't get the same love as your typical macaroni salad but if you follow the tips we've shared here you're gonna have something that's every bit as enjoyable and instead of just some random bowl of boring between a potato salad and a macaroni salad you might actually end up with something that's the highlight of the picnic which is why i really do hope you give this a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 251,086

Rating: 4.9626894 out of 5

Keywords: Pasta, Salad, Perfect, Picnic, macaroni, side, dish, barbecue, summer, recipe, chef, john, food, wishes, cooking, holiday

Id: H0L6k5C76BI

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021