The Best Pasta Salad in the Midwest

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by

William
in

Most people don’t give a shit about the backstory, so it is at the bottom.

Ingredients

Fresh

Assume everything is organic.

  • 6-8 oz block Havarti cheese, diced
  • 2 heads of Broccoli, very-ends only
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced (see notes)
  • 2 Bell Peppers, diced (anything but green)
  • 15 oz Black olives, Sliced or small whole
  • 1/2 Red onion, diced (Get one the size of your fist)
  • 6-8 oz Summer sausage, diced
  • 4-5 Mini Cucumbers, diced

Grocery/Pantry

  • 1.25 pounds of Dialinti pasta (backup options listed below)
    • Just do a single 16oz box if you’re feeling lazy

Seasonings

  • Hidden Valley Ranch seasoning + Dry Italian Seasoning (see Notes)
  • Whatever Italian dressings you have on hand (see Notes)
  • Garlic Expressions Dressing (It’s a garlic-based vinaigrette) Try and seek this out, find an alternative or omit this ingredient entirely.

Method

Cook your pasta as per the directions for the type of pasta you are using. In most recipes we found online, they suggested using “cold pasta” for the recipe or left-over pasta. Without worry, if you rinse your pasta with cold water after cooking that will certainly make it cool enough for this pasta salad.

While your pasta is cooking, bust out your favorite knife and start prepping your other ingredients: Havarti cheese, garlic, broccoli, onion, bell peppers, cucumber, and summer sausage. Open and drain your Black olives.

You will need a fairly large container to mix this all together. Ideally you can also use this same container to let the pasta salad sit in after it’s all put together. Letting the flavors marry together as a single batch for at least a couple of hours is an essential step. We use a Rubbermaid 2.5 gallon container. (Amazon link below)

Once all your ingredients have been added to your large container, it is time to add whatever seasonings you see fit. Don’t go out to the store to buy spices for this recipe. You will more than likely have what you need in your pantry already. Nothing fancy is required, as your dressings will pack a lot of punch. This is where we add our secret weapon, the dry dressing concoction mentioned above. With all the prepared vegetables and pasta in the large container, dust the entire top of the salad like you’re topping a dessert with powered sugar. Be liberal.

Slap on a pair of vinyl gloves and get your hands in there and mix it up. Mix everything together until the moisture of the prepared vegetables has consumed the seasonings. Now take your gloves off and pull out your salad dressing lineup. Typically, we marry together three different dressings, two different Italians and then another distant relative that pairs well with everything else we got going on.

Italian Dressing Lineup

  • Newman’s Own Organics Italian
  • Girard’s Champagne Vinaigrette
  • Olive Garden Light Italian Dressing

Non-Italian Lineup

  • Garlic Expressions Dressing
  • Sweet Onion Bacon
  • Briannas French Vinaigrette
  • Harissa Ranch

Add a bit of each of the dressings to the pasta salad. I low-balled how much dressing we should use in the first couple of batches. The amount of dressing you add will depend on your particular taste, but know that the pasta absorbs quite a bit of the dressing when you let the batch sit for a while. It’s not the end of the world if you have to add more dressing later. You’d rather have drier pasta salad than have it floating in its own dressing. The soft cubes of Havarti cheese are a good visual indicator as to how dressed up the salad is.

Have lots of containers to pass out this salad to your family and friends. It looks great in those small Ball Mason jars. N’Joy!

Notes

  • You’re only using a small section of the larger broccoli. Save the stalks and anything else not used and add to a large freezer bag for making vegetable stock in the future.
  • Rubbermaid 2.5 gallon container (this is not an Affiliate link!)

on Bell Peppers

on Garlic

  • Legit cloves not the stuff in jars floating in oil
  • In a hurry? Granulated garlic

on Black Olives

  • Rarely spend too much time getting fancy with olives as they are all bathing in large amounts of salt.
  • Drain these well, but straining is unnecessary unless you feel inclined.

on Summer Sausage

  • Because Usingers is not readily available all over the states, the closest distant relative is Johnsonville. You’ll understand just how far that distance is if you come to Wisconsin and enjoy Usingers sausage!

Backup pasta options

  • Tri-Colored Rotini
  • Mini Farfalle
  • Farfalle
  • Cavatappi

on Seasonings

  • Grocery stores sell packets of dry salad dressing bases you can use to make your own dressing at home. They also sell packs of four of five packets in a box. Grab yourself a box of Hidden Valley Ranch mix and also dry Italian Dressing Mix by whatever brand makes you happy inside. We empty all the packets of seasonings into a Ball Mason jar and shake it up to blend them all together. This might be the secret weapon of the recipe.

on Salad Dressings

  • Because we knock this recipe out quite a bit we have a rotating lineup of Italian dressings that we combine to create a “lazy house dressing”.

Fun articles related to this topic

Backstory

Food Blogs sure have come a long way since the word “blog” was something only nerds used in casual conversation, have they not? The quality of the photos and videos are of such a phenomenal quality that it’s easy to make it so any learning home-chef is easily intimidated and not want to even start! Sometimes on YouTube videos, one has to wonder if the particular angles they are using are for their efficiency or make sure you are fully aware they are using All-Clad cookware or Viking appliances and not whatever cheap crap you own.

All recipes published online should come with a backstory. Food does not need to be complicated. Comfort food does not mean cheap. Most of us have recipes from our relatives that, with a little tweaking could run circles around whatever is trending on Food Network at any given moment. Food blogs are twisting the perceptions of the kitchen in strange ways not beneficial to the home chef, especially the ones who are just beginning their journey. This is not to say that there are not YouTubers out there trying to push the tide in the other direction. Shoutout Ethan Chlebowski.

Lots of things in the kitchen have been made to make your life in the kitchen easier. However, when the hammer comes down the reality is, you can still get things done in the kitchen the same way they did a hundred years ago and life won’t be too bad. In many ways, the old-school way of doing things in the kitchen is the surest path to bringing back to life the Joy of Cooking. In those fleeting moments where you wish you had a piece of cookware or utensil that you do not own and you have a weird feeling inside, all you have to do is think about the scene from the movie adaptation of Fight Club when Tyler Durden is making his toast on the stove over an open flame. You don’t need anything fancy in order to cook.

Growing up as a child, going to the grocery store was something that I truly enjoyed. Back in the days of CD Walkmans with ESP technologies, I’d break apart from my Mother and navigate each aisle and observe everything I could. How things were placed, and how many. All the strange details most of us walk right past. It should have been my earliest sign that, despite having gone to college for information technology that I’d have found much more fulfillment engaging with the public with regard to their food problems as a Butcher and not their computer problems as some sort of Tech Support.

For the past several months I’ve been doing my Grandmother’s grocery shopping for her. The place where I go to get her groceries has this pasta salad they sell in their Deli which my Grandmother really enjoys. It is often on her list of things to get at the store. More often than not, it is very clear that not only the Deli department, most of the store is extremely understaffed. The Pasta Salad is never in stock. Additionally, the list of ingredients leaves something to be desired. Lots of unnecessary terms and other hard-to-pronounce ingredients. None of which follows the Rule of 1900. That is to say, if it wasn’t a food ingredient in the year 1900, it does not belong in my body.

It was clear that it was time to take the opportunity to add depth to the relationship my Grandmother and I have in the kitchen. So there we were one afternoon, and again one evening equipped with a MacBook and coffee. Sharpie pens and memo pads. Obsidian and Xmind. Talking about what makes the perfect Pasta Salad. We engaged with the internet and its search results to find out what others thought their version of perfect meant. This is when we realized that what makes a perfect salad is entirely dependent on where you are in the United States. As with most other things, our Americanized version is far-removed from their origin stories. Thick coats of Red, White and Blue tend to do that.

Pasta salad, as we Americans know it today, descends from a long line of dressed macaroni dishes, both hot and cold. Dressings (oil/vinegar, mayonnaise, cream sauces) and additions (vegetables, herbs, spices) varied according to culture and cuisine. In the early 20th century we begin to find recipes for macaroni salad in American cookbooks.

These were typically dressed with mayonnaise and served in cold molded presentations. Think: perfect domes of chilled macaroni salad served as “sides” in diners & delis. Alternatives? A side of cottage cheese or coleslaw. In the USA, “Macaroni salad” generally denotes a mayonnaise dressed side dish, popular for picnics. “Pasta salad” is generally dressed with vinaigrette. Both are served chilled, can welcome chopped vegetables (celery, onion, olives)and are popular sides in hot weather. Which macaroni shape to use? Elbow macaroni is traditional in the USA.

Food Timeline

Readily available ingredients married together with whatever concoction of salad dressings you may have on hand bring this pasta salad to life in a heartbeat. A great example of how simple ingredients can be taken to the next level in order to achieve your version of perfection. We’re graced with being located in one of the cheesiest places in the universe where diversity in cheeses is wild and abundant. Espresso Lavender Cheddar cheese, 10 year aged This & That. It’s all over the place.

OpenPLUTO

Doing it different since 1981.