Pasta salads deserve to be in your meal prep rotation and a default for larger potlucks given how easy to prepare they are and the tasty satisfaction they offer. Despite the convenience, there are many mistakes that can ruin your pasta salad (or “mistakes” that make for better pasta salads). The name of the game for a successful meal is texture; thankfully, with one simple cooking trick, your pasta salad avoids sogginess and gets a major textural upgrade. The key is to slightly undercook your noodles — just under al dente — to create the perfect bite.
Undercooking your pasta by a couple of minutes doesn’t mean you bite into raw, brittle pasta. On the contrary, your pasta salad has the optimum bite because it continuously absorbs liquid as it marinates in the mixture of veggies and dressings, both of which come with a considerable amount of moisture. If you serve overcooked, cooked to completion, or even al dente pasta, the additional water from the chopped vegetables and dressing gets soaked up and eliminates pasta’s satisfying chew. What you get instead is the entire opposite: A disintegrating disaster of a salad.
Choosing the best pasta shape for your salad
Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes, each delivering distinctive qualities in many a pasta dish. When it comes to pasta salads, however, you can’t just go with any shape willy-nilly (well, technically you can, but it’s not the wisest). As a general rule of thumb, opt for smaller shapes that can easily be speared by a fork or scooped up in a spoon.
Think twisty shapes like rotini, fusilli, or cavatappi, which offer an increased surface area for the flavorful dressing to cling to, ensuring each bite packs a punch of flavor. You could also use bowtie pasta (traditionally known as farfalle) because it features a lovely butterfly shape with ridges that offer a stable vessel for the flavorful components to adhere to. Another fun bite-sized shape is the wheel-like rotelle, which offers plenty of nooks and crannies to carry the dressing and other key components of the salad. For a more grain-like meal, the rice-resembling orzo or the chewy pearl couscous are your answers.
Just steer clear of long shapes such as spaghetti and linguine. They are not suitable for curating the perfect, flavorfully balanced bite of a pasta salad owing to their long, slender shape without crevices to carry additional flavor. When prepping your dish, keep things fun and interesting by playing around with a medley of pasta shapes, finely chopped veggies, and an herbaceous dressing to entice little kids and adults alike.
