Meet the salad of your dreams! This Italian pasta salad is simply DELICIOUS; with pasta, crunchy veggies, bocconcini cheese, salami, chickpeas and radicchio. Served with a beautiful lemon mustard dressing!
Italian Pasta Salad Ingredients and Variations
- Pasta: choose your favorite pasta! For this recipe, I suggest fusilli, penne or casarecce.
- Chickpeas: 1 can of cooked chickpeas. Make sure you rinse them well before using.
- Salami: simply cut into cubes or slices. If you’re looking for a vegetarian option, you can skip the salami.
- Cucumbers: ideally mini cucumbers.
- Tomatoes: cherry tomatoes cut in half.
- Radicchio: if you’ve never used radicchio before, now it’s your time to try it! It’s an Italian vegetable that is super fresh and a bit bitter. It looks like red cabbage, but smaller. You can swap for arugula if you prefer.
- Pepperoncini: optional, but really ads a nice spicy touch to the salad.
- Shallots: or swap for diced red onion instead.
- Cheese: we’re using mini bocconcini but you can also use mozzarella.
- Fresh herbs: like dill, basil or parsley!
Italian Pasta Salad Dressing
In a pasta salad, you need a good amount of dressing. This will add so much flavours! You’ll need:
- Olive oil
- Dijon mustard
- White wine vinegar or red wine vinegar
- Lemon juice
- Honey or maple syrup
- Garlic cloves
- Salt
A Few Notes on the Dressing:
- Salt: you’ll notice that we’re adding a good amount of salt here! Since we don’t add any salt to the salad itself, we’re adding more for the dressing. Trust me on this one!
- Use a mason jar: it will be easier to incorporate all the ingredients and keep in the fridge.
- Pour the dressing on the salad 30 minutes before serving if you can!
Conservation
Keep the pasta salad with the dressing in the fridge for up to 2-3 days.
Damn Good Italian Pasta Salad
8
to 12 servings20
minutes10
minutes30
minutesMeet the salad of your dreams! This Italian pasta salad is simply DELICIOUS; with pasta, crunchy veggies, bocconcini cheese, salami, chickpeas and radicchio. Served with a beautiful lemon mustard dressing!
Ingredients
- Salad
454g of dry pasta (like Fusilli, Penne ou Casarecce)
1 can of cooked chickpeas, rinsed and drained (540ml, 19oz)
100g of salami, cut into cubes (optional)
1 ½ cup of mini cucumbers, diced
1 ½ cup of cherry tomatoes, cut in half
½ a radicchio (or 1 small), shredded
¾ cup of diced pepperoncini peppers(optional)
2 shallots, cut into cubes
200g of mini bocconcini cheese
Fresh herbs to taste (like parsley, basil, dill, etc.)
- Dressing
1 cup of olive oil
2 tbsp of dijon mustard
3 tbsp of white wine vinegar or red wine vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp of honey
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tsp of salt
Instructions
- Cook pasta according to package instructions. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process.
- Prepare the dressing. Add all the ingredients to a mason jar, cover with a lid and shake well.
- Add cooked pasta and other ingredients to a big bowl. Pour the dressing and mix well. Ideally, let it sit for 30 minutes before serving.
Notes
- Radicchio: if you’ve never used radicchio before, now it’s your time to try it! It’s an Italian vegetable that is super fresh and a bit bitter. It looks like red cabbage, but smaller.
- Pepperoncini: you can easily find pepperoncini in most grocery stores. They’re often near the marinated veggies and olives.
