Italian Pasta Salad Secrets

Summer is the best for Pasta Salad: with the right mix you can cook a balanced meal that has everything you like: pasta, vegetabables, cheese, ham and so on! But in order to achieve a good Pasta Salad you have to follow some rules and procedures. Let's see how can you make an awesome pasta salad!

Choose the right kind of Pasta

It may sound obvious but if you are starting up your cooking career you should not underestimate this first step! There are many kinds of pasta (refer to this wikipedia page for a reference) but in order to attain good results, you should stick do shaped pasta or kinds of pasta that can be "singled out", for example avoid spaghetti and the like.
Why? Because we want to avoid stickyness which would cause lumps of pasta. Some of the best kind of pasta to start with are:

Rigatoni

Penne/Pennette/Penne rigate/Macaroni

Fusilli/Rotini (which are great with tuna)

Rotelle

Farfalle

Conchiglie

Pipe

Cooking the pasta salad

BE warned: you need at least 4 hours for this method.

Add one tablespoon of olive oil in the boiling water, before adding the uncooked pasta. This will prevent the pasta from sticking to each piece.

Cook the pasta until has reached "al dente" level. (usually it's one minute before the suggested time). We want it to be chewy so keep an eye on the timer. After you have strained accurately the pasta, put it over a clean cloth and arrange it in a broad pattern: this is very important! It will prevent the pasta pieces to get stuck each other. Some people wash the pasta under cold water, but this method will keep all the flavour.

When the pasta is cold, put all of it into a pyrex (or equivalent glass container) add one tablespoon of oil for each person (i'm assuming you have cooked enough pasta for each person) and finally add the other ingredients. Don't be hasty and wait for the pasta to cool down completely.

Stir the ingredients well, and let the container rest in the fridge for at least a couple of hours. It is better to get out the container at least one hour before serving in order for the temperature to rise to the normal level and enjoy the full fragrance of the ingredients.

Some final words of the ingredients

 

You could experiment a lot, but you could obtains good results with mozzarella cheese, fresh vegetables and sliced ham. Some leaves of basil with tomatoes will give you a really fresh taste.
Most importantly, you need an high quality kind of pasta in order to get an awesome italian pasta salad: visit cybercucina if you wanna buy some excellent kind of pasta!
Have a nice meal!

original text courtesy of: www.lospicchiodaglio.it