Classic Pasta Salad

I found the cutest tricolor pasta on my last trip to HomeGoods, and I’ve been looking for the perfect recipe to use it with for a while. Well, I’ve finally found it with this Classic Pasta Salad! It’s chock full of many flavorful ingredients, but the part I liked the most was the homemade vinaigrette dressing. Many of the pasta salad recipes I looked at called for bottled Italian dressing. Now, that’s great for convenience, don’t get me wrong, but I really wanted something totally from scratch. So let’s find out if this recipe is worthy of that tricolor pasta!

Classic pasta salad is made with a tri-color rotini, filled with vegetables and cheeses, and coated in a homemade vinaigrette. The perfect recipe to feed a crowd!

Recipe Author: Heather at The Toasty Kitchen
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The Ingredients

Obviously, pasta is the main ingredient here, and the recipe actually calls for tricolor rotini. I get it—rotini has all those nooks and crannies to really hold sauce and dressing, making it popular for pasta salad. My HomeGoods tricolor pasta find had several additional shapes with plenty of those dressing-holding nooks and crannies. I had to do some research to try to figure out the names, and I hope these are correct:

  • Creste de Gallo (literally “comb of the rooster”, ridged macaroni with a wavy spine)
  • Cuoricini (heart-shaped pasta)
  • Grape clusters (a specialty shape)
  • Girelle (smooth conical/corkscrew twists)
  • Penne Regate (thin tubular pasta with ridges)
  • Radiatori (literally translates to “radiators” 😳)
  • Rotini (a.k.a. fusilli, twists)
  • Ruote (a ridged tubular flower/wagon wheel shape)
  • Sendani Rigati (ridged tubes)
Classic Pasta Salad Ingredients
Tricolor pasta, red onion, green bell pepper, black olives, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, sliced pepperoni, olive oil, red wine vinegar, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, grape tomatoes, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes

I had several other ingredients in my pantry in addition to the pasta. Olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic powder, Italian seasoning blend, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. I even found a can of black olives (the type isn’t listed in the recipe but is in the blog post). I had to slice them for this salad, but it was easy to do and surprisingly quick.

That left me to shop for the produce, meat, and cheeses. I found them all at my regular grocery store, but most of the packages left me with extras. I was worried I would end up wasting them, but I managed to use them up in a puttanesca a few days later.

Lastly, you might have noticed a wedge of parmesan in the photo of the ingredients. I decided to grate it myself for some reason. I’m sure grated parmesan from the dairy case would have been fine. I just had to be extra.

The Process

First off, I need to mention this recipe makes 24 servings. That’s great for a crowd but too much for the 2 of us. I halved it and we made it into a few meals since it was hearty enough for light dinners by itself. My kitchen scale made weighing out the ingredients much easier than I thought it would be.

My Classic Pasta Salad kicked off with boiling some water for the pasta. I used a 4.5-quart saucepan to make sure it was large enough for the pasta. Once I weighed out 12 ounces of pasta (the package was 17.6 ounces) I began prepping the vegetables.

Chopped and sliced vegetables
Chopped and sliced vegetables

I had the veggies done by the time the water was ready (about 10 minutes), so I salted it, added the pasta, and made sure to stir periodically while I finished up the other prep work. The package I bought didn’t have detailed instructions with a cooking time (so weird!) so I took a guess and boiled it for 9 minutes.

I wasn’t quite finished with prepping the cheeses and pepperoni by the time the pasta was done. Prepping the cheese wasn’t bad, but separating all the pepperoni took forever! Tip: It’s not listed in the recipes, but the photos show the pepperoni is halved.

Sliced pepperoni and prepped cheeses
Sliced pepperoni and prepped cheeses

When I drained the pasta I noticed a lot of breakage and realized it was on the verge of overcooking. So instead of simply leaving the pasta in the colander to cool per the recipe, I ran it under cold water to stop the cooking process. It ended up being a good thing since the pasta was fine and this method cut off a lot of prep time.

Once the pasta was saved I finished up the prep work and made the salad dressing. Assembling this recipe was just a matter of adding all the ingredients to a large bowl and mixing them together. The only “problem” I had was the pepperoni clumping together. It was cut very thinly, and I think that caused it. No amount of picking it apart really fixed the problem, so I recommend thicker slices like what you find on most pizzas.

I let my finished Classic Pasta Salad sit for an hour to meld the flavors, then we dug in. And good news—hubby said the clumped pepperoni was his favorite part!

Timing

This recipe lists 25 minutes to prep plus 1 hour of resting time, for a total of 1 hour and 25 minutes. My time was 1 hour and 33 minutes, and I think picking apart the thinly sliced pepperoni was what caused the slowdown.

So how was it?

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Accurate Time(s)
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There was nothing I didn't love about this Classic Pasta Salad! It has so many flavors, but not too much or too little of anything. Even the onion and green pepper were "there" but I could still taste everything else, including the vinaigrette dressing. Making this pasta salad wasn't difficult, but there were a few things I had to check the blog post for. Namely what type of olives (black) and how to prep the pepperoni (halved). All in all, that was pretty minor. I went a little over the time listed, but I chalk that up to using thinly sliced pepperoni. it took a while to pull it all apart, then it clumped up when I mixed up the salad. My husband loved the clumped pepperoni, but next time I'll look for something a little thicker like what I find on pizza so that doesn't happen. I'm also going to try the dressing on a lettuce based salad because it was amazing!
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I'm Candice, and I'm The Hungry Pinner. I created this blog to share my love for cooking and my experiences with the MANY recipes I've found on Pinterest over the years. Join me as I blog my way through those recipes to find out if they are worth trying yourself.

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There was nothing I didn't love about this Classic Pasta Salad! It has so many flavors, but not too much or too little of anything. Even the onion and green pepper were "there" but I could still taste everything else, including the vinaigrette dressing. Making this pasta salad wasn't difficult, but there were a few things I had to check the blog post for. Namely what type of olives (black) and how to prep the pepperoni (halved). All in all, that was pretty minor. I went a little over the time listed, but I chalk that up to using thinly sliced pepperoni. it took a while to pull it all apart, then it clumped up when I mixed up the salad. My husband loved the clumped pepperoni, but next time I'll look for something a little thicker like what I find on pizza so that doesn't happen. I'm also going to try the dressing on a lettuce based salad because it was amazing!Classic Pasta Salad