Tips for a delicious pasta salad

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: a pasta salad.

Do you know what we find disgusting? That soggy pasta salad with rancid mayo and dull pieces of wet tomato. Just give us a fresh, richly filled pasta salad with a sturdy bite, full of ingredients that you probably just have lying around in your pantry. With these tips, you'll always make the tastiest pasta salad from now on.

A pasta salad where you throw in your best leftovers (from roasted turkey to half a fennel bulb in my case), because you can really put in whatever you feel like. I'm sharing my recipe here, but especially replace what you don't like or add something that makes it completely your pasta salad. Vegetarian? Chickpeas and salted chopped almonds instead of turkey and bacon, for example. Upgrade from feta and mozzarella? Gruyère and/or tasted burrata. Raw bell pepper boring? Go for grilled vegetables from a jar. Almost anything goes, so get creative.

With these basic tips, you'll make the best, easiest pasta salad

Ratios
I start with 250 grams of pasta for four people. In contrast, you want about double the weight of other ingredients. That pasta expands once cooked, and you don't want a pathetic stingy dish where you have to search for the tasty bits. I also have about 175 ml of dressing or vinaigrette ready, which I add and mix with the salad in stages.

Onion or not
I'm not fond of raw onion (except spring onion) and I don't use raw red onion in the salad, even though it looks nice. What I do like is a minced shallot or red onion in the vinaigrette. The acidity softens and mellows the onion.

Equal size
Somewhat, because I don't have a measuring tape on the cutting board. That would defeat the whole purpose of such an ultimate easy meal. But you want to be able to eat it with just a fork, sitting with your bowl in the sun or on your lap, so make sure everything is bite size . For this reason, you choose a ‘short’ pasta like fusilli or farfalle.

Cold shower
There are a whole bunch of pasta rules as you probably know if you follow us, because we just can't stop talking about them. But for a pasta salad, we make the exception that you can rinse the pasta cold. You want to stop the cooking because hot pasta would absorb too much dressing, and you can't let it cool down for a long time because the starch would start to stick together. So go ahead: just rinse it under the ice-cold tap in a colander.

Mix and rest
Try not to dive into that bowl right away but let it chill a bit so all the flavors can meld. It's also ideal for tomorrow as a leftover lunch.

Pasta salad recipe
Hardly a recipe to mention because it's so incredibly easy:

• Cook 250 grams of pasta according to the package instructions, meanwhile make a quick vinaigrette, and then rinse the pasta cold.
• Let it drain well in a colander.
• Chop or shave some raw vegetables; in this case spinach, fennel, bell pepper, and spring onion.
• In a large bowl, mix the vegetables with the pasta and a few tablespoons of the vinaigrette.
• Cut the other additions into somewhat equal sizes.
• (Yes, this turkey breast still needed to be cut small and the pepper into rings).
• I had kept the ingredients separate due to the mysterious aversion of the kids to feta and red pepper…
• We also had mozzarella, crispy bacon, parsley, and that turkey breast.
• Mix through the rest of the salad and toss again with enough dressing to taste.
• (We adults sprinkled the feta and pepper on our salad last.)
• What I want to add next time, when I've been to the supermarket: Kalamata olives, large capers, tuna from Fish Tales and boiled eggs. But you do you!

As you can see: with some preparatory chopping, you're actually ready in no time. Enjoy!