Give Pasta Salad 20x More Flavor With The Help Of Your Favorite Dip

If there's one thing everyone should have in their fridge, it's a tub of premade, store bought dip. Expectedly delicious on raw veggies, chips, and crackers, dips also have a handful of unexpected uses that take them from casual appetizer to crucial ingredient in certain recipes. For instance, hummus instantly elevates mashed potatoes, while jarred pesto brings grilled cheese to the next level. These dips, plus many others, are also excellent for packing your pasta salad with effortless flavor.

Two things make store bought dip superior to homemade dressing when it comes to pasta salad: convenience and flavor. Since making pasta salad is surprisingly tedious (boiling the pasta, letting it cool, chopping ingredients, etc.) slinging ¼ cup or so of dip into it instead of making it yourself saves time. Store bought dips are also already jam-packed with tons of flavor such as our favorite, Heluva Good! French Onion dip. There's no stirring and tasting and wondering what's missing, just plenty of salty, savory goodness ready to go.

The only drawback to using dips to dress your pasta salad is that many of them are relatively thick and dense, which is great for scooping with carrot sticks, but not so great for coating pasta and cubes of cheese and cured meat. Fortunately, this is easily remedied by upgrading your store bought dip with a touch of oil, a little vinegar, or even a splash of water. The idea is to loosen it just enough to stir evenly throughout the dish.

When thinning your dip into a luscious dressing, it's best to add the amount you'll need to a mixing bowl and whisk in your oil or vinegar after prepping other ingredients, while the pasta is cooling. This gives the dip plenty of time to marry with the flavors of what you're using to thin it, or to taste and adjust flavors accordingly. You want it to be just loose enough that it drips from the spoon, but not so loose that it becomes runny. If it becomes too loose, just add a little more dip.

Though you can use any dip you have on hand to dress your pasta salad, this hack is only successful if your pasta salad ingredients and your dip share a flavor profile. For instance, hummus or tzatziki would be delicious with cubed feta cheese, capers, chopped olives, and cherry tomatoes. Similarly, if you're using salsa, you could fill your pasta salad with cubed cotija cheese, cured andouille sausage, corn, and black beans. Something like the aforementioned Heluva Good! French Onion Dip could be delicious with roasted and cooled broccoli and bell peppers, crumbled bacon, and cubed parmesan cheese.

Understanding how to build flavors like these is generally as simple as matching the ingredients in your pasta sauce to the region your dip comes from or is inspired by. Hummus and tzatziki are Greek, pesto is Italian, salsa appears across Latino cultures, and things like French onion dip are classic vintage Americana.