The Pasta Salads I Bring to Every July 4th Cookout

Today we're gonna make three summer pasta salads. These are great for holidays, summer cookouts, and the best part, they're super easy to make. Okay, so we're gonna go over the ingredients for the first one. This is an Italian-style tortellini pasta salad. I have one pound of tortellini here, half pound of spinach, half pound is regular. You can use any tortellini you like. In the original print recipe that's on my site, I used a little bit more than this. I used one and a quarter pounds, but this will be fine. Six ounces of baby spinach. I have a half a pound of mozzarella balls that I just halved. I have 12 ounces of cherry tomatoes that I halved. I have a little bit less than a quarter pound each of Genoa salami and hot soppressata, and I just had it sliced like so, and then I just chopped it into pieces. Half a cup of Kalamata olives. I thought I bought pitted, but I didn't, so I squeezed all the pits out. For the dressing, we're gonna have about a third of a cup of extra virgin olive oil, half a cup of red wine vinegar, one clove of garlic that I just turned into a paste, two teaspoons honey, two teaspoons Dijon mustard, two teaspoons dried oregano, and a quarter to a half a teaspoon of hot red pepper flakes. Okay, bring a pot of salted water to boil, and then we're just gonna cook the tortellini until they essentially, these were frozen, but until they float and that they're still al dente. So you can just test one, try it if you want. They don't take long, only a couple minutes. And then after they come out, we're gonna rinse these in cold water. We wanna stop the cooking process completely before we mix our pasta salad. For the dressing, you can whisk this in a bowl if you want. Dijon mustard's gonna help emulsify it, so will the honey. But honestly, it's easier just to do it how I'm gonna show you here. And you can do this for all three of them. So third of a cup of olive oil, roughly, half a cup red wine vinegar, two teaspoons dried oregano, and about a quarter teaspoon of crushed red hot pepper flakes, one clove of garlic that is turned into a paste, two teaspoons of honey. The honey's gonna help balance out all that vinegar. You don't have to put it in if you don't want to. And then the two teaspoons of Dijon mustard. All right, so like I said, you can whisk it if you want. So it might break apart a little bit, your dressing, but I just use one of these immersion blenders. All right, that's pretty good. You can add a little bit of mayo in here if you want. If you put mayo in this, you're gonna have a creamy Italian dressing. You can also put cheese into it. So I would go about a quarter cup of Pecorino Romano or Parmesan cheese, put them in there, and that will really help emulsify it. It'll thicken up your dressing a lot. All right, I'm gonna save this because we'll use it for the other dressings too. Okay, so just so you know, like when you're boiling tortellini, a lot of directions will say once they fall to the top, but a lot of times they'll fall to the top even after 30 seconds if they're frozen. These have gone for three and a half minutes. So I just tested one, they're good. That's what I would do because, you know, they'll float sometimes and they're still rock hard. Just gonna drain these and run them under cold water. Okay, spinach. I know it's only six ounces, but it's a lot to start with. It'll turn to nothing even without cooking it just when the dressing hits it. So what I did with this salami and the soppressata is I spread them out each piece on the cutting board, like everywhere, and then sliced, chopped them just so it gets a little bit more air pockets if you were to stack them all together, everything would kind of be stuck together. So I'll put the other half on after. Okay, olives. Same thing, I'll save some of the tomatoes. Just make sure the pasta, the tortellini, is drained very well. Oh, the one ingredient I forgot to tell you about for this one, and we definitely want to put a bunch of it on there, is basil at the end. So I'll go get some basil. Okay, mozzarella too, drain this. I'm gonna drain it. Yeah, depending on like what type of mozzarella you buy, you could also use block mozzarella in this and that you're not gonna have to drain, but any type of fresh, you're gonna have to drain it and even pat it dry a little bit. We don't want too much liquid in here. There will be from the spinach and the tomatoes, but try to take out as much liquid as you can. I probably should have used a little bit more mozzarella, but that's up to you. Just gonna zap this one more time. Okay, and then let's put that on there. Save a little bit. I'm gonna not put all that in there. Just because I did back off, the original print recipe has more tortellini in it, and I probably didn't need it for this, but get the general idea here. I just have a platter here. Nope, really filling that up, but wanna get all the tortellinis at the bottom, so. And then I have some nice basil leaves. Well, fairly nice from the store. You can leave them whole or you can just kind of just hand tear them all over. Pasta salad number one, Italian tortellini salad. I'm actually gonna put it back in the bowl or maybe I'll leave it like this, but I wanna get it in the fridge. All these things are better when they just sit for a while. That spinach will get a little bit more reduced and the flavors will just come together more. Let's make recipe number two. Okay, recipe number two. This one is a lemon herb orzo pasta salad. So this is really herby and it has some texture from these pine nuts. So for this, I have one pound of orzo. So just get salted water to boil again and we're gonna do the same process. We're gonna cook this to al dente and then we're gonna run it under cold water to stop the cooking on this one. I have three cups of peas. Okay, so it's like, it has a lot of green in this one, I would say. I have a half cup of pine nuts and we're just gonna toast them in a second. And then I have one and a quarter cups of feta cheese. So you have a lot of acidic bite in this one because it's a lemon vinaigrette. For the herbs, we have half a cup of minced fresh dill and a half a cup of minced flat Italian parsley. Really can't go overboard with the parsley. You definitely could with the dill. We'll see what the taste tester thinks. He's not the biggest fan of dill, but I think dill is perfect in this one. I have the zest of one lemon that'll go on at the end. That'll give it more of an acidic bite. I just have a little bit of red onion that is finely diced. So probably a little bit more than a quarter cup there. And then for the vinaigrette, we're gonna have extra virgin olive oil also that I have off to the side. And then I have a quarter cup of lemon juice. I have two tablespoons red wine vinegar. I have two teaspoons Dijon mustard. I have two cloves of garlic that are turned into a paste. I have a tablespoon of Greek oregano. You can use any oregano you like. That's pretty much it. We don't have honey in here, but you certainly could add honey here to balance it out because it's very acidic. Again, I do think the flavors work this way, but you know what I'll do? I'll give that dressing a little taste test and maybe we'll pull an audible and put a touch of honey into it. And now I really want you to know that on any of these recipes. If there's something that you think needs an adjustment, you can make it yourself. It's really that simple. All right, so we're gonna mix up vinaigrette again and then we just have to do one little cooking step here. Okay, we're gonna do the vinaigrette in the same manner. So quarter cup lemon juice, three quarter cup extra virgin olive oil. So since we already have roughly a quarter cup, we'll go all the way up to until it says a cup here. If you're worried about pricing on extra virgin olive oil because everything's expensive these days, you can do half a neutral oil in here. You could even use three quarter cup neutral oil. This is what all restaurants do. They all do it, okay? They do it to save money. And if you look at cookbooks from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, dating myself, almost all vinaigrette recipes will say salad oil, okay? They'll say salad oil and then they'll have like olive oil as another part. You can do that. It will save you money. All right. That's that tablespoon of oregano. That's two tablespoons red wine vinegar. Two teaspoons Dijon mustard. And then the two cloves of garlic. Gonna take that same one. Didn't even clean it because flavors are roughly the same anyway. All right. That's mostly emulsified. Let's just taste it. Very thick. Do the same thing on the other one too. Taste it if you need salt and pepper. All right. So this is what I mean by like that emulsification, just by using that hand immersion blender. Delicious. But I am gonna put a little bit of honey in it. This one's been on the site for a while. There's reviews on, a good amount of reviews on it already. Perfect. That did the trick. Gonna update the recipe. All right. We're gonna toast the pine nuts. Putting them all in the pan. Just kind of spread them out. And I want to keep this fairly low, about a three out of 10. You go a little bit higher, but you got to watch. If you burn these, then you know you're out of luck. And these are not inexpensive either. And these aren't even Italian pine nuts. Okay. These are Chinese pine nuts. You know how you know the difference? Tara, do you know how you know the difference between them? Aren't the Italian ones, first of all, they're way more expensive, but aren't they much smaller? They're actually longer. Oh, they're longer. They're longer. The Chinese ones are shorter and fatter. Okay. Those are the ones from Costco? These are from everywhere. Even Italian brands now are selling these. So this was an Italian brand imported from Italy that is selling Chinese pine nuts. I don't remember the name. I forget. I got it yesterday. I threw out the bottle. Because I bought one bottle that was 50 grams or roughly a quarter cup worth of pine nuts. Yeah. And I've seen that a lot on the imported ones too. So I don't even know how they get away with it, but that is the case. I will tell you, there's not too much of a difference for my taste. But I would think if you go to like a good Italian bakery and they're selling you pinoli cookies, which are run in the city, they run 40 to $50 a pound now, they should be using the real Italian pine nuts for it. Anyway, I digress. These are going to be nice when they're toasted for texture. But you got to watch. They will brown very quickly. Okay. Your first warning sign is going to, you're going to start smelling them. They're going to smell completely different. They smell great. So that's going to let you know that they're getting, starting to brown on some parts. All right. So just keep watching them. Want to get a nice golden color on them. You just don't want black. If you get, you know, if you get them that way, it's going to ruin them. And just keep them spread out. I'm cooking the orzo. That package said five minutes to al dente, but I'll start checking around four minutes. All right. That was like probably only 30 seconds since I just turned off the camera. And look at that. See how nice and golden they are now. All right. They're good. Turn it off. Now you want to take these out of the pan too, because they're going to continue to cook. So just put them in another dish while you're waiting. Okay. Just drain that well. All right. This is three cups of peas that I thawed. If you're using frozen peas, just microwave them till they are thawed and then drain any excess liquid from them. Okay. That's that onion. I'm not even going to use that much. I'll use like that much. If you want to like tone down the onion, you can soak it in water with a little bit of sugar. Okay. Now the recipe says a sweet onion, but I couldn't find a sweet onion. So I used a red onion, which is not sweet. So red onion will give you better color, but I would probably go with what the recipe says, a sweet onion. Okay. There's the dill that James loves. There's the parsley. Here's my dressing that is still together. I'll use that much starter. I'm probably going to need it all. I might need even more olive oil for this one because when you let this sit overnight, it's going to absorb everything and you can just put a little bit more oil before you serve it. Say you're bringing this to like a cookout, barbecue, whatever, you can re-judge it. Okay. So feta mix in. I'll save a little bit for the top. I love feta cheese. Love it. If you don't like it and you want to use a different cheese, you can do that. But the feta gives that really nice salty bite. I just think it goes really well in a lot of pasta salads. All right. So if you put this in a platter, then like the next day I would put the pine nuts on last. I'll do it right now. I'll do most of them. Same thing with the lemon zest. I would put that on last too. I'll just use about that much. And that's going to give a nice textural like element to it. Lemon, herby, orzo pasta salad. This would be good hot too. I mean, you know, if you want to make it hot. Right? Let's do recipe number two, which is my favorite and is the easiest one. Recipe number three. Oh, recipe number three. You know, it's funny when you think you say something and then you don't say it, right? Like, thank God you're over there helping me. Yeah. All right. Recipe number three. All right. This one I have been making forever. I love this one. I love how easy it is. And I'm going to tell you, you can make this even easier if you want. You don't even need to make the dressing I'm making. You can go buy a bottle of Italian dressing. You really can. Or you can just do oil and vinegar. But we'll do a little bit of a dressing here. So this one is a bow tie Gorgonzola spinach pasta salad. I have 12 ounces of spinach here. Use a lot of spinach. You could even use a pound if you want. I have one pound of bow tie pasta. We're going to need about three quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil. We're going to need a half a cup of red wine vinegar. Two cloves of garlic that are turned into a paste. Two teaspoons Dijon mustard. Two teaspoons dried oregano. Half a teaspoon crushed hot red pepper flakes. That's going to be our dressing. A quarter cup to a half a cup of minced flat leaf Italian parsley. And then we have a half a pound of Gorgonzola cheese. You can use blue cheese too. If you buy a block of it, make sure you're buying one that's relatively firm so you can crumble it. Not the softer types of Gorgonzola, like I think like the Dulce is the one that's very soft. You don't want that, okay? You want something that's going to have texture in it and that the pieces of it will stick to everything. All right, all we have to do here is make the dressing and then we're going to cook our pasta until al dente again. But there is one major difference for this one. Don't run it under cold water till it gets completely cold. You can run it under for about 20 seconds to slightly cool it, but we want to wilt the spinach a little bit in this pasta salad. All right, so we'll make the dressing. I'm going to use the measuring cup from the first one because the dressing is so similar. It is so good. We were going to put this one in the cookbook, but what we just decided, do we not have a pasta salad category in the cookbook? We have a salad category in the cookbook. Yeah. So that one didn't make it. It almost made the cut. There are a lot of salads in the cookbook. I don't know exactly how many, Tara, do you know offhand? Eight, maybe? Eight. Yeah, there's a couple new, there's a new one in there. There's a farro pasta salad. That's a harvest salad. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's like a really good one for fall. There's the Sunday dinner salad, which is the way it sounds. Yeah. Perfect for Italian-American Sunday dinner. We have a panzanella salad in there. Panzanella. Yeah, that's really good for summer. Spinach salad with the hot bacon dressing. That's always so good. Chicken Caesar, Italian potato green bean. So I'm adding three quarter cup of extra virgin olive oil here. It was hard to pick what was going to make the cut and what wasn't going to make the cut. You could buy the cookbook here or here if you want, if you haven't bought it. If you have bought it already, we really appreciate it. You guys are the best. And thanks for leaving us comments on Amazon. Ooh, yikes. Well, it looks like battery's going. All right, well, I think I made it. Made it through three salads today. Yeah, I love this thing, but battery doesn't last too long. You just recharge it then. Let's check for salt and pepper again in this one. Punchy, this one. Vinegar, it's good. You could use the same dressing that you made for the tortellini salad. All these dressings are fairly similar. I mean, salad dressing itself is always similar. It's just, you're always using a vinegar and you're always using an oil for a dressing. I mean, it's really hard to make a dressing without an acid. Like you kind of just have to have one. So if you're having like a summer gathering and you want to make this spinach bow tie pasta salad and the tortellini pasta salad, you could just make the dressing all at once and just use the same. Absolutely. So yeah, you can essentially kill two birds with one stone. So make it a little easier for you. And you can make these your own. Like if you don't, you know, if you think like, oh, you know, Jim's a little too vinegar heavy on this one, use less vinegar, okay? You could also balance it with honey or sugar. Now it's just, it's very easy to do. I actually think that for this particular salad, pasta salad, our creamy balsamic vinaigrette that we have on our website, I think that would work really well because that goes really well with spinach and the gorgonzola. Absolutely. I ran it under a little bit, but you'll still see a little bit of steam coming from it. That's what we want. It's gonna help wilt that spinach a little bit. And you can let this cook, like you cook it maybe a touch less than that al dente since it is still a little warm here. It'll still just soften a little bit. All right, so I'm gonna put half the dressing on the start. Roughly half. Put the gorgonzola in. Put that parsley. And you could also just blend this parsley into the dressing if you want. And the hardest thing with this one is just to mix it. If you got a bigger bowl, use it. I'm probably gonna get gloves on. It's the easiest way. They used to make a similar one to this in the deli I worked at. That's why I've been making this forever because that was over 30 years ago, or roughly 30 years ago. Wanna make sure everything gets coated. But yeah, if you had like a 10 quart bowl right now, that would be the easiest. And then you could just kind of like flip things together really, really easily. Now this one really needs to be refrigerated. Like it gets so much better, so much better overnight. Try to get a little bit of cheese and the bow ties. I love it. Now, if you don't like gorgonzola or blue cheese, you're not gonna like this one. You can use feta. Goes without saying, but it's so good and it's so easy. So you saw three really easy pasta salads. We're gonna see what the taste tester thinks. We'll let him pick what the best one is. All right, James, school's over, huh? Yep. Last test today, right? Regents? Yeah. Aced it? Yep. All right, let's see how you do on this test now. It has a lot of dill in it. Yeah. But it has peas. You love peas, you don't like dill. Does it balance it out? It's not bad. Okay, I'll try this. My biggest criticism on both of these is there's too much lemon, I think. It's like- Lemon's in this one. No lemon in this? No. Both of them taste bitter. That one is a red wine vinegar and gorgonzola. I actually just put a little bit of dressing on each one of them. So it's probably, you're getting a big punch of it. Like, I also put it on that one too. I wanted to judge them up before you ate it right now because I had more dressing left on the side here. I could have just served it to you how it would be served normally. I just wanted to see it, see the dressings. Yeah. This one's the best. I think there's way better pasta salads than these. Okay. I think- Like which one? Like, just like penne, like the one that like, yeah, barbecues. That's like the best pasta salad. You know what I'm talking about? Which one? It's like penne with like celery and like some other stuff. Like, I think there's like mayo in it. There's no mayo in any of these. I put soppressata and salami in this one. I figured you would, this would be the one that you like, but- I do like that one. Okay. It's the only one that like, like really this one is like too bitter because of the lemon, like- Let me see. I don't know. Do you think it needs to be sweeter? I think these two could definitely be sweeter. This one's fine the way it is. And like, I'm honest, and I'm going to say when like, I don't like things that much. Like, I don't know, I'm a little like disappointed in you. You're disappointed in me today? Yeah. Oh, uh-oh. There doesn't need to be so much like spinach, you know? You think there's too much spinach? Yeah, make it a little unhealthy. A little unhealthy? Yeah. None of these are healthy, I would say. Okay. You want to be the first one? I love that one. So what would you, what would you change for each of them to make them not disappointing? This one's good. This one, I don't really know. That one has a lot of gorgonzola in there. I like, I like gorgonzola. Okay. I don't know what to do with that one, honestly. I would say for this one, take out the lemon and just take it out and add some sweetness, like some sugar. I don't think the dill is really a problem. I know, and like, no, I probably said that last time, but I don't think it's like that bad. This one's good. I like the mozzarella. I like the cold cuts in there. Only thing I would change on this is less spinach and change the pasta shape to penne. I would give this an eight. I think with what I've said, it could be a 10. This, I don't know. It's not terrible. It's like probably like, it's probably like a, like, like six and a half. This one, like, like I said, like it's probably six and a half too. I think it would be like, maybe like a- The theme here is no mayo in any of these dressings. I think these are both like, they're not bad, like, but this could be better. I don't really know what to do with this. And this one's good, but like I said, it could be leveled up a lot. Just like I said, penne and less spinach. And this one's sweeter. I'm like the total flip side of you, James. The feta and orzo one is probably my favorite followed by the bow tie gorgonzola. Really? And then the tortellini is, I think they're all good, but the tortellini one is my least favorite of the three. I'm not the biggest fan of the tortellini. I like, like, I think penne would just be way better. Okay. I think penne is the best pasta or pasta salad. Yeah. You're a simple man. Yeah. You're a simple man right now. Well, sorry. That's okay. So eight, and then what do these get? Six and a half. Six and a half? All right. Six. Six, okay. I know you're being generous. I know you want to give them even less. You want to eat all of them now or not? No, I'm just, I'll buy this one. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for watching. Thank you for- Yeah, if I don't bring them in the other room and eat them, you know, they're not that good. Thanks again for watching. And thanks again for, you know, I mean, you know, you do know, he's honest. That's the one thing that I think, I think probably the most important thing we bring to the end of this channel here is that it's not just me eating everything and saying, hey, it's the best thing in the world every time. I don't think any YouTube cook would do anything. I mean, what would they ever tell you? Oh, this is horrible. You know, don't make it. Yeah, you need someone like you're 14, actually 15 now, your old son telling you that. And you know, like when you want to be a good cook, you gotta mess up sometimes. That's right. That's right, I messed up. Okay. Now you're not getting a fist bump. No fist bump. See you next time.