For The Absolute Best Pasta Salad, Repeat This Step Twice

Pasta salad is one of those deceptively difficult dishes to get right, where one small tweak in the process can spell the difference between a delightful, hearty meal with oodles of texture and a sad bowl of sour mush. It gets tricky mainly because of the dressing — after all, pasta's centuries of development were made with sauces in mind, not vinaigrette. In fact, dressing errors account for a lot of the most common mistakes everyone makes with pasta salads. Perhaps unintuitively, it turns out that the best way to avoid these gaffes is to dress your salad twice.

Writing for The Kitchn, author Ann Taylor Pittman conducted an experiment involving six different, well-regarded methods for making pasta salad, aiming to find the technique that would give her the best balance of springy noodles and vibrant flavor. It was her final attempt, where she mixed in the dressing on two separate occasions, that earned a perfect score on her taste test.

The twice-dressed method involved tossing cooled tender pasta with half of her dressing, chilling it in the refrigerator with the rest of the toppings mixed in, and then tossing it a second time with the remaining dressing. This, Pittman wrote, resulted in a pasta salad with bouncy noodles and robust flavors.

Ann Taylor Pittman's earlier attempts ended up in pasta salads that were either lacking in flavor, terrible in mouthfeel, or both. Her first experiment involved going with overcooked noodles; theoretically, the noodles would firm up as they cooled via a process called retrogradation, resulting in the ideal texture. Instead, Pittman's pasta stayed mushy and had absorbed too much water to take in any flavor from the dressing.

She then tried dressing it while the pasta was still warm — which means the pasta is still more porous, and will therefore absorb more flavor — but it ended up giving her salad a gummy texture. Her third attempt involved dressing the salad three hours before serving, which supposedly gives the pasta enough time to absorb the dressing without getting mushy. This, however, ended up drying out the salad, with the pasta absorbing too much of the dressing and muting its flavors.

For Pittman's fourth attempt, she dressed the pasta after cooling it in an ice bath. This method arrested the cooking process and preserved the bouncy texture she was looking for, but also made it so that the pasta didn't absorb much of the dressing, making the salad a little flat overall. The fifth attempt involved cooking the pasta al dente (undercooking your pasta salad works, too) and dressing it at room temperature. The texture and flavor earned this method a score of 9 out of 10, and it didn't have any clear flaws.

By combining parts of the earlier methods, Ann Taylor Pittman was able to get the best results. She dressed the pasta salad at room temperature, which meant that the noodles would still be slightly porous, but not so warm that there's any risk of it getting gummy or mushy. She then cooled her salad in the refrigerator to help firm up the texture of the pasta while also letting it absorb the dressing over time.

Tossing in the remaining dressing just before serving solved the issue of the pasta absorbing too much of the dressing. With more of the liquid on the surface of the salad, the flavors of the dressing were able to stand out more fully, and were buoyed by the milder flavors from the pre-dressed noodles.

There's clearly a lot more science to pasta salad than you might have thought, which is why experiments like Pittman's are so helpful in finding the perfect methods for making it. Even if you use flavor-packed ingredients like the ones Ina Garten recommends for pasta salad, the wrong techniques could throw everything off. Thanks to Pittman's meticulous trial and error, however, you don't have to make those mistakes — just dress your pasta salad twice, and you'll have everyone at the potluck raving about it.