Make the Best Pasta Salad with Soft Noodles

I think Americans have fetishized the concept of “al dente.” Yes, spaghetti should have a touch of tooth to it, but some home cooks and restaurants take it too far, leaving a crunchy, undercooked core in their noodles. But spaghetti aside, there is one dish in which you should never, ever cook the pasta to al dente, and that’s pasta salad.

Using al dente pasta will give you a hard and chewy pasta salad. This is science, specifically a process called starch retrogradation. If you’ve ever eaten leftover spaghetti straight from the fridge, you’ve experienced its effects. When cooled, the gelatinized starches rearrange themselves into a more ordered, crystalline structure, leading to a tough texture.

This is a real danger in pasta salad, a pasta dish that is famously served chilled. Luckily, it is not hard to compensate. Instead of pulling your noodles the moment they hit al dente, cook them until they are fully tender, just on the edge of mushy. In our Japanese Macaroni Salad, which I made last weekend to go with our 7Up Chicken, we recommend adding a minute to the cook time suggested by the packaging.

It works like a charm. I made the salad on Saturday and ate leftover pasta salad all the way through Tuesday—it was a big batch—and not once did I encounter a hard or crunchy noodle.

But back to that Japanese mac salad for a moment. I think it might be my new favorite. Like curry rice and tonkatsu, it’s an example of yoshoku cuisine: a Western-influenced style of Japanese cooking. It’s usually made with Kewpie—a custardy, yolk-rich Japanese mayonnaise made with rice vinegar or cider vinegar, both of which are pleasantly sweet and tangy. To replicate Kewpie’s flavor, we toss the cooled mac in a mixture of tangy rice vinegar and American-style mayonnaise (along with chunks of smoked ham, which I love).

We also add some vegetables, though we take a couple extra steps to make sure they don’t release moisture into the salad. First, we toss them with salt to draw out water, letting them sit in a colander for at least 5 minutes, then we squeeze the veggies with our hands. It really is the difference between a creamy pasta salad and a watery one.

(If you’re not a fan of mayo-based salad, check out our Esquites-Inspired Pasta Salad, which uses Mexican crema instead—then check out our collection of No-Mayo Picnic Salads.)

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.

And if you're looking for more Milk Street, check out our livestream cooking classes with our favorite chefs, home cooks and friends for global recipes, cooking methods and more.

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.