Claire Makes Pasta Salad with Romesco

Action. (laughs)

Was that not good?

Oh, I'm pretty self-directing. (laughs)

(light music)

It's peak tomato season right now

so I'm gonna show you a recipe for Romesco pasta salad

that uses some great farmers' market tomatoes,

that has a really tangy dressing, some basil, some parm,

and it's a really wonderful make ahead dish

for all of your summer potlucks and picnics.

This recipe has a couple of different components

that all come together at the end

and it's really about sort of a textual contrast

with the pasta and this tangy

kind of Romesco inspired dressing

which is made from roasted red peppers, garlic,

and usually almonds, I'm gonna use the walnuts instead.

So the first thing I wanna do is

prep my ingredients for my dressing

and also toast a cup of walnuts.

So the walnuts are gonna be used in

the kind of Romesco dressing

and also I'm gonna save some and chop them

to fold in at the end.

So I have a cup here, these will go into a 350 oven to toast

and they'll take about 10 to 12 minutes.

I'm just looking for them to be

a little bit darkened in color

and very kind of fragrant and toasty smelling.

Here I also have my big pot of boiling water for the pasta

and I'm just gonna season it.

This is kosher salt, we always use kosher salt for pasta,

and I like to put in several tablespoons

so I just kinda eyeball it.

(food processor whirring)

I use the food processor in this recipe

a couple different times.

The first thing I'm gonna use it for

is to make sort of my fresh breadcrumbs.

I have a loaf of country bread here

and I only need about three ounces of bread

but with the crusts removed so I'll start by

just using my bread knife to remove the outer crust.

I think I'll need about a quarter of the loaf.

Any kind of white sourdough or pullman would work,

you could use a wholegrain bread but I like sort of the

density of just a country loaf.

So I'm going to use the food processor

to break this up into fresh breadcrumbs

but before that I just wanna cut it into one inch pieces

to give the food processor a little headstart.

So I'm gonna measure this out and weigh it.

If you don't have a scale at home

and you don't have any way of sort of knowing

what the weight of bread is, that's fine,

you're just ultimately trying to get to

a cup of fresh breadcrumbs at the end.

I'm going for about three ounces of bread

which cut into pieces this size

will around a cup and a half.

So into the food processor.

(food processor whirring)

Now I just pulse it.

If I were to process the whole thing I would kind of make,

it would kind of turn into a paste so I'm just pulsing it

to break up those large pieces

and then once everything's broken up, I can process it.

So I'm going for coarse crumbs here,

I don't want them to disappear into the pasta salad.

So this is looking good.

You can see I have some finer pieces

and some slightly larger pieces,

I don't wanna go much finer than this.

Gonna transfer these to a bowl.

(food processor whirring)

So the walnuts are almost done,

I'm gonna jump over and start the dressing.

So I have some jarred roasted red peppers here, four whole.

I'm gonna start with my lemon.

The acid in this recipe comes from lemon juice.

I'm going to first just zest the lemon

and save that for my breadcrumbs later on.

So I have my microplane.

Sometimes I see people microplaning like this,

my method is to kind of use it the other direction

but either way works.

So usually one medium lemon like this will yield

a couple of teaspoons of finely grated zest,

and then I'm gonna cut the lemon in half and juice it.

That can go right into the food processor.

I can smell that the nuts are toasted

so I'm gonna pull these out of the oven.

You can see that they've taken on a nice golden hue

and you can't smell them but they have a really

kind of deep roasted aroma.

So I'll let these cool off.

So about a quarter of these go into dressing so,

you know, you can just eyeball it, it's not too precise

so that looks about right,

and then the rest I'll save

and once they're cool, I'll chop them,

and those go into the pasta salad.

So in the dressing, I have the lemon juice from the lemon,

the four whole roasted red peppers just from a jar,

two whole raw garlic cloves,

a half a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes,

so that gives a little bit of heat.

I found that with pasta salads,

when you're serving a pasta dish cold like this,

you have to really,

it really needs a super flavorful dressing

because that's sort of,

the colder kind of tamps down some of the flavors.

So in go the walnuts.

So I have a half a cup of oil.

Feels like a lot but it's a lot of pasta

with a lot of surface area

so it needs that volume to coat everything,

and once this mixture is smooth,

I'll start to process it, I'll stream in the oil.

(food processor whirring)

I also love the kind of like reddish orange hue

that it gives the whole pasta salad,

it feels very summery with the tomatoes

and the contrast from the basil.

So into the feed tube, I'll just stream in the oil

and by streaming in slowly, it'll emulsify the dressing

so it's thick and even has sort of

like a light airiness to it.

It also makes a lot of dressing

and that's because cold pasta has a tendency

to like really absorb a lot of liquid and moisture

so we have to make a lot of dressing

so that even after the pasta salad's

been sitting out for a little while,

it still has kind of like a nice sauciness.

Now I'm just gonna season with a little bit of kosher salt.

I can put that back in my measuring cup where I had the oil.

Now I'm gonna take my breadcrumbs over to the stove

and start to crisp those

and get them nice and golden in a pot

and I'm also gonna cook my pasta.

So this shape I love for this pasta salad.

We call for fusilli giganti in the recipe

and that is just like an extra large kind of corkscrew shape

so anything that's kind of in that family will work.

You could use like medium shells would be really nice

but what I love about this big corkscrew shape

is how well it catches all of the,

not only all of the sauce

but all of those other components in there

like the chopped walnuts and the breadcrumbs and everything.

While my pasta's cooking,

I'm also gonna crisp my breadcrumbs

so I'm gonna bring the breadcrumbs

and my lemon zest over to the stove.

Set that here.

So very often when we give a pasta recipe,

we say to undercook your pasta

and that's because you end up cooking it more

in the sauce over the stove.

Unlike those recipes, we're not cooking the pasta again,

it's being served cold,

so you wanna cook it fully in your water,

even a little bit past al dente

because as it cools down, the pasta will firm up.

So into the water.

This doesn't have a time on it,

I'm gonna check it after about 12 minutes.

It's a pretty thick pasta shape

so I think it'll take a little while.

So I'll set my timer and occasionally I'll give this a stir.

Okay, so that's going, and then I'm gonna turn,

put some heat under this saucepan.

Hopefully that clicking stops.

No? (laughs)

Alright, we'll go to this burner.

So I'll get medium heat under this saucepan

then I have two tablespoons of olive oil.

Once the oil's hot,

and you can tell because it will shimmer a little bit

across the surface, in go the breadcrumbs.

And I also toast the breadcrumbs

with another a half teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes

and then that finely grated lemon zest from the lemon.

So you wanna keep this moving in the pot

because if you kind of let it sit

oftentimes you'll get some burning around the edges.

We just wanna let this go

until the breadcrumbs are turning golden brown

and start to crisp and then while I'm over here,

an occasional stir into the pasta.

Yeah, I can do that.

It's not really doing either one very well.

I'm actually extremely left-handed, extremely left dominant,

can't do anything with my right hand.

These are just about there.

Your nose is a good indicator.

They are turning golden and also smelling very toasty.

So I'm gonna pull these off,

they'll also continue to darken a little bit,

especially in this hot pan,

so I'll transfer them back into this bowl

and bring back over to the station with me.

So it's been 10 minutes,

I wanna show you a test for pasta doneness that,

I mean, obviously you could just taste it,

but one thing you can look for is,

hold on, I have to go back over there,

follow me over there, sorry.

Is if you cut into the pasta,

you'll often see if it's not quite done yet,

there's like a little white core and if I taste it,

not quite done.

When I was a kid I loved eating raw pasta, it was weird,

I don't know why that was enjoyable.

Okay, someone's calling me, hold on.

No, I don't know who it is, anyway, sorry. (laughs)

It's not my mom

but my mom does call me in the middle of the day though.

She's like, Oh, I'm so glad you answered.

Where do you think I am?

Okay, over to the pasta.

So at this point it's fully cooked,

none of that starchy ring in the middle,

I'm gonna go drain it.

Follow me back over to the sink.

So normally I would never rinse pasta

because the pasta has this kind of starch coating on it

and in a hot pasta dish,

you want that starch there to help thicken the sauce

but actually it works against you in this recipe because

it will really tighten up that liquid

and kind of turn the sauce a little bit pasty and thick

and I don't want that to happen,

I wanna keep it nice and loose and coating the pasta.

Then I'll shake it off.

Also, I didn't mention this before

but this is one pound of pasta.

I have a giant bowl and in goes the pasta

and a bowl this size is really helpful

because there's a lot of ingredients to toss together.

So at this stage,

I'm gonna toss the pasta with about half of the dressing.

I'm not adding all the dressing for a couple of reasons,

one, over time the pasta will really kind of

absorb that dressing and kind of turn it a little bit dry

so I'm reserving half to toss through at the end,

but it's actually a good thing

that it's gonna absorb a lot of those flavors

because that's gonna help season everything.

Okay.

So now I have all my components here

that are going into the pasta salad.

I'm gonna start by chopping my parm.

So it's four ounces of parm, that's a nice, generous amount.

I'm the person in the grocery store,

'cause parm is really expensive,

so I'm the person who looks through

every single pre-wrapped piece

for the piece that has the smallest amount of rind

so I feel like I'm getting the most for my money.

Think my dad would be proud.

You know there's a lot of different kind of grades of parm

and I love the parm that has those big crystals in it

like this

so you kinda can taste them as you crunch down on them.

Same with the breadcrumbs,

I like having all the pieces be kind of irregular,

I'm not chopping them into perfect cubes.

Also sometimes I'm lazy and I kind of just find

if I already have the knife and cutting board out,

I just find it easier to chop

than getting out like a box grater.

I'm gonna move this off to the side

and then I'll do my walnuts, same thing.

When you chop nuts, you kind of inevitably get

some bits that turn to dust.

My favorite part of this recipe, the tomatoes.

They have this big beautiful bowl of heirloom tomatoes

and I need about a pound.

You could use cherry tomatoes is fine,

that would be great.

I like using heirlooms 'cause you can kind of cut them into

these nice irregular shapes.

So that's a, each one of these is about a half pound.

I think I like the idea of using different colors.

A pound.

The tomatoes do so many things in this recipe,

they add a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of acid,

and I think most importantly like that juiciness

so when you bite into it,

it kind of marries with the rest of the pasta salad.

We have all of our components here,

all we have to do is finish assembling.

So at this point, if you did all of this prep,

you could just throw some plastic on top of the pasta salad

and let it sit here for several hours.

Obviously keep the basil in the fridge so it doesn't wilt.

So I'm gonna add the rest of the dressing,

and I'm adding the dressing

before I'm adding the rest of the ingredients

because I don't actually want the dress...

I want the dressing to coat the pasta,

not so much everything else.

So I'm gonna add tomatoes, the nuts and the parm.

Now breadcrumbs, sprinkle these on top,

and I know I said it before

but I just love the way the breadcrumbs in particular

kind of work their way into the grooves of the pasta.

Basil.

And at this point I'll just kind of gently fold

all these things through.

I don't wanna bruise the basil too much.

Now I'm ready to make a plate.

Couple of basil leaves on top.

And then just a final sprinkle of breadcrumbs.

Andy.

Do you wanna taste a little pasta salad?

No, pasta salad with Romesco sauce.

Mm-hm.

Fresh tomato, basil. Yeah.

Delicious. Yeah, right.

We finally get to eat tomatoes when it's tomato season.

I know.

Which for us is kind of a rare thing.

It's very refreshing.

I love this shape.

Yeah. It's so fun.

Yeah, me too.

I hope you try this really fun summer side

to bring to all of your barbecues and picnics

and it's a great way to use up

all those awesome tomatoes at the farmers' market,

so thanks for watching.

[Crew Member] Wrap, wrappy wrap.

Yeah, we would eat like strands of spaghetti.

[Woman] So did I.

[Woman] Really? It was so crunchy.

Or like, yeah, yeah.

[Woman] My parents were like, Why?

I think my parents were just like, You're annoying us,

we're trying to make dinner, chew on this,

and I'd be like, Okay.