Pay attention to ingredients and timing: These mistakes often happen when preparing pasta salad.

class=”sc-29f61514-0 jbwksb”>

Pasta salads are especially popular in the summer: they are easy to prepare, delicious and ideal as a cold side dish for a picnic or barbecue. Depending on your own preferences, such salads can be replaced with the pasta and ingredients of your choice, as well as herbs, spices or sauces.

Preparation is usually quick and uncomplicated. However, mistakes often occur during the cooking of pasta that can affect the taste of the food. There are even things that can go wrong when it comes to seasoning or salad dressing. These are six typical mistakes made in pasta salads.

For a pasta salad to be truly successful, the first thing to do is to choose the right type of pasta. Pasta should be the size of a bite and neither too small nor too large so that you can easily eat it with a fork. For example, cellentani, whistle, orecchiette or spirelli are suitable.

It’s best not to use hollow pasta, as it may contain water after cooking, which can dilute the salad.

Even if the pasta salad is seasoned and sauced later, the pasta used should not be boiled in unsalted water. The food will taste better if you salt the pasta water and let the flavor spread into the pasta dough.

For pasta salads, it is best to cook the pasta for one minute less than usual or indicated on the packaging. This prevents the food from being too soft. It is also easier to pierce the pasta with a fork. If you want to make sure that the pasta has a little bite, you should rinse it with cold water after draining it. This will cool them down faster and won’t make them mushy. It is important that the pasta retains a certain amount of heat.

If you prepare the pasta salad only after the pasta has completely cooled, it will not be able to absorb the flavor of the other ingredients as well. Herbs and spices are especially helpful when the pasta is still a little hot. The heat allows the flavors to be released better.

Dressing right or wrong in terms of taste is of course a matter of opinion. However, if you are not going to eat the pasta salad on hot summer days, it is better to stay away from mayonnaise. Bacteria multiply particularly rapidly due to high temperatures, so not every sauce is equally suitable. There is even a risk of salmonella poisoning if the mayonnaise contains eggs, and if the sauce is exposed to heat for a long time and then consumed, there is a risk of salmonella poisoning.

In such cases, vinegar, oil or pesto is more suitable as the basis for the sauce. After all, no one wants to have a stomach ache or, at worst, get poisoned after eating a salad.

Pasta salad should not be served directly from the refrigerator. It should be allowed to come to room temperature for about twenty minutes before eating. This is because when it cools, the flavors come out less. If in doubt, pasta salads should be spiced up a little more.

Source : Blick