Summer has arrived and with it pasta salads are back. This dish not only stands out for being useful, easy and quick to prepare, but it also becomes the star of the summer because it is perfect for any plan: from taking it in a container to the office to an impromptu picnic. But let's be honest: not all pasta salads are great.
Some just take a bite to get by and others, directly, some even ask themselves “is this food?” It usually happens, above all, if we improvise on the fly and end up with a mixture of ingredients that are not very pleasant to each other. Luckily, there is a way to take a pasta salad to the next level without making your life complicated. And no, we're not talking about adding more mayonnaise.
The key is, in addition to getting the mix of ingredients right, in the dressing or sauce that rounds off the whole thing. A trick that many chefs and experts share is to enrich pasta salads with the liquid from pickled cucumbers, or the brine from any preserved vegetable pickles.
SuckerPunch Gourmet
They use this trick, above all, for the canonical macaroni salad The typical recipe has a creamy dressing that usually uses mayonnaise as a base, but there are also variants with yogurt, sour cream or cream cheese. However, what interests us is that, as with the Russian salad, it is the perfect example of how pickles go perfectly with mayonnaise and the like.
The key according to experts is not that it tastes like a pickle, but that its acidity cuts the fat of the dressing and awakens the flavor of the cold pasta.
This liquid, which we usually throw away without stopping to think that it can be reused, is rich in mineral salts and vinegary and acidic, but balanced flavors. Above all, it provides that aromatic power that the pickling process has through fermentation.
To put this trick into practice, we just have to add said liquid to the dressing or sauce of the recipe, emulsifying all the ingredients well together. It is a matter of playing carefully with the proportions depending on our taste and the specific recipe we are preparing. It is best to dress the salad lightly before letting it cool in the refrigerator, and add the rest of the dressing just before serving.
It works especially well with creamy salads but also with any other recipe that is eaten cold or warm. Therefore, it is also ideal to apply with potato salads.
Cover photo | engin akyurt
