FOOD NEWS
Why You Shouldn't Use Farfalle When Cooking Pasta Salad
BY ADDISON PAUL
Pasta salad is perfect for a summer cookout, making for an easy and tasty addition to the menu. However, farfalle is not a good shape to use, even if you see others use it.
Farfalle has knots in the middle that don't wind up as soft as the rest of the noodle, even after a while of cooking. For pasta salad, the noodles are cooked just past al dente.
As the pasta cools, a process called retrogradation makes it firmer, so it doesn’t help farfalle that's already firm in the middle. Undercooking could mean crunchy pasta salad.
The sauce also plays a role in why farfalle isn't suited for a pasta salad. The shape is too flat to actually catch any of the dressing, and there just isn’t enough surface area.
Fusilli pasta is the best choice for pasta salad, because the corkscrew shape provides tons of nooks and crannies for the thinner sauce to cling to, adding flavor in every bite.