Dan Pashman Wants You to Get Excited About Pasta Salad

With a decidedly unsexy, mayo-heavy reputation, pasta salad doesn’t have many enthusiasts. TV personality and host of The Sporkful podcast Dan Pashman wants to change that. His new cookbook Anything’s Pastable has an entire chapter devoted to the oft-maligned side dish, packed full of recipes that are vibrant and bright, with tons of textural contrast and unexpected flavor combinations.

If you missed Dan's class at the Milk Street Cooking School, don't worry. He was nice enough to hop on a call and discuss the structural integrity of pasta shapes, the importance of crispy bits, and why he never uses mayonnaise to dress a pasta salad (with one notable exception).

Why do most pasta salads suck so much?

Well, first of all, it seems like most people only know one or two. There's macaroni salad. And then there's—I‘m not sure what the name of it is, but it's often [made] with tricolor radiatore. And it kind of has an acrid vinaigrette and maybe a couple of diced peppers. And those can be okay. But, as I try to make the point in my book with all categories of pasta dishes, there's a lot more that we can and should be putting on pasta.

But also those two in particular are just not all that exciting. Macaroni salad scratches a certain childhood barbecue comfort food itch for me, but I don't get excited about it. So I wanted to have a whole section in my book that would be pasta salads to get excited about.

Is macaroni one of your least favorite pasta shapes?

I don't love it. Maybe if you got a really good one it would be pretty good. I generally just don't like very small, flimsy shapes. There are small, sturdy shapes. If you made macaroni salad with ditalini I bet it would be a lot better.

Ditalini is a small tube like macaroni—how is it sturdier?

It has thicker walls than macaroni, so that's part of it. And I'm doing some scientific speculating—you'd have to double-check this with a structural engineer—but I know that ditalini—it's also called tubetti—has a lot of tensile strength and I think it might be because it doesn't bend. Macaroni bends. I'm not positive, but they probably can't make the walls thick and have the macaroni be as tiny and have it bend; it would get clamped on itself. The only way you can make a macaroni with walls as thick as a ditalini would be if it was like the size of a creste di gallo, like a sort of a bigger elbow than you usually see in a macaroni salad. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to get that bend.

The other pasta shape people use a lot is bow tie, which is also kind of a nightmare for a few reasons, right?

A hundred percent, yeah. They don't cook evenly. It's almost as if they were designed in a lab to avoid holding sauce. And they don't work easily with any utensils. Bow ties don't hold any bits or pieces. They tend to fall off a fork. They're not going to bring pieces with them. And you can spoon them, but they're kind of big and unwieldy to have on a spoon. They're also just difficult to eat.

One interesting pasta salad you have in the book is a crispy gnocchi pasta salad. How did you come to that recipe?

I love crisp in all its forms. I knew that I wanted texture to be a big part of this cookbook, because the truth is that most pasta dishes that we eat in America are pretty mono-textual. There may be slight variations in the consistencies of the sauces, but it's still all the same gloopy, saucy texture. And maybe there's meat in there, but there's very little crisp. You don't see a lot of pasta that has crispy bits. And crispy gnocchi is so easy to make. To me it's just a delightful thing. You make the crispy gnocchi, you can keep it separate from the dressing, toss them together at the last minute. It's amazing.

You also get a nice flavor when you toast the gnocchi. It's similar to the spaghetti all'assassina in the cookbook, where you're pan-frying pasta until it turns golden brown and crispy. It's crispy, it's crunchy, but it also creates a different flavor. It makes it smell and taste like toast. That also adds a nice component. So anytime you're crisping up pasta in a pan, you're not just getting texture, you're also introducing a new flavor.

You're introducing those Maillard browning flavors.

A hundred percent, yeah. And with the crispy gnocchi pasta salad, in some ways it feels similar to a panzanella. When you make a panzanella, those early bites are great, the bread is still a little crispy. And then after it sits for a little bit, the bread starts to turn soft, but then the soft bread has soaked up so much flavor that it becomes delicious in a new way. I love that sort of transformation that happens with a panzanella. I think you get a similar thing happening with this pasta salad.

In the book you say to think of pasta salad like a green salad and work back from there. Why do you think that approach works so well?

I think that somehow with the word “salad,” the fundamental components of a green salad got lost. They didn't travel with the word. When we transitioned from green salad to pasta salad, it became very mayo-y and gloopy. Anyone who loves a good salad [knows] first of all, there's going to be some acidity. There's going to be bright flavors. It's not going to be gloopy. It's not going to be heavy. It's going to be bright. It's going to have a sort of savory zing to it and then it's going to have some amount of crunch whether it's from greens or anything else. A great salad is kind of juicy. It should be bright and acidic and fresh and crunchy and juicy, sort of mouth-watering. Especially in the summertime, when you're eating at a barbecue or something. Those are the flavors that I want, especially in hot weather.

When you’re dressing pasta salad, do you tend to use pretty high-acid vinaigrettes?

Yeah. Obviously, I didn't come up with the idea of putting lemon juice in the salad dressing, but I love all of those salad dressings. I have lemon wallpaper in my kitchen. I love all things citrus. I just think people don't think about that flavor profile when they think of pasta salads.

I think the only recipe that calls for mayo is the Italian cafeteria hot dog salad. Is that right?

That's right. Yes.

And what made you use it there?

Well, because that's the authentic way to do it. That is a real dish. And that's probably the most purely authentic Italian dish in the cookbook, the only one that I didn't mess with, because it plays against the perceptions of Italian food. It didn't need me messing with it anymore. It was already surprising. I think I said this in the head note, but people have very romantic ideas of Italian food. And Italian food can be very romantic. We all have these visions of the hills of Tuscany, a trattoria in Rome, you know, candlelight and the bottles of wine and everything is like beautiful and perfect. But also: Italians really love hot dogs. And I think it's okay to burst the bubble of Italian romanticism a little bit.

Do you favor dry Italian cheeses like Parm and pecorino over the usual shredded cheddar?

In the pasta salads, yeah. I just think that those are going to mix into the dressing and coat the pasta more. Shredded cheese certainly has its place. I love shredded cheese when it's being melted, but I don't love room-temperature shredded cheese. I guess maybe if I found the right cheese, but it just doesn't hold that much appeal to me. That's probably just my personal taste.

I could see that. Texturally, it's kind of neither here nor there.

Yeah, that's right. And I guess I'm probably just biased in that I like the flavors of Parmesan and pecorino more.

Do you grate it yourself every time?

No, I often use the store-grated. In the book, in fact, I recommend that in a lot of uses because, for instance, with a carbonara or a cacio e pepe, where it's always a little bit of a struggle—some people struggle to get the cheese to emulsify and mix in. Usually the store-grated cheese is going to be a finer grate than home-grated. The more finely grated it is, the more it's going to dissolve into whatever sauce or dressing you're making with it.

What’s the best way to cook and store the pasta if you're prepping it ahead of time?

I mean, I probably would not put it in the fridge. Most dressings and pasta can be left for a little while—you could keep them separate. There are some techniques in the cookbook for how to cook pasta in advance. If you finish cooking it and then drain it and then put it on a sheet pan so that it cools quickly, it'll stop cooking and you can leave it out, maybe cover it with plastic once it's cooled.

It's the kind of thing that I would make an hour or two before the company arrives, or before I go over to my friend's house where I'm a guest. I would make it an hour or two in advance and I would leave it on the kitchen counter and then mix them together and serve it.

And you cook the pasta for pasta salad al dente, or a little past al dente?

Usually al dente. I guess it depends a little bit on how long I expect it to be sitting together. If it's going to be sitting for a bit, then maybe I would do a hair less. I always want it to be tooth-sinkable.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
All photos by Dan Liberti.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.