The art of Italian cooking: pasta salad with ripe tomatoes

Hi, this is the fifty ninth post about the art of cooking Italian pasta.

It’s summer, it’s hot and we’d like cold dishes, very digestible but tasty.

In Italy we have great food and the creativity to combine it in tasty dishes.

Let’s talk about the art of making a very simple dish: pasta salad with ripe tomatoes.

Pasta salad with ripe tomatoes

Some of you could ask why we are talking about this dish so simple. It’s true: it’s easy-to-do but if you know some secrets you can make a great dish really, even if its ingredients are very poor. With the perfect ingredients and the right technique it should be a masterpiece of taste and aroma! Besides it can be made every day: good food  for a very healthy eating.

Here are our secrets! We learnt them at Ischia (Italian island) about 20 years ago listening to a great chef explaining how to make a successful pasta salad with poor ingredients.

1) Choose the basil very carefully. It must have great aroma. Wash its leaves with delicacy and pat dry them with kitchen paper. Put apart. Cut them by hands just before serving. Add the basil pieces to the pasta salad  and stir.Serve at once.

2) Choose the chives very carefully. It must be fragrant and swollen. If you choose basil and chives well your pasta salad will smell fantastic and that will be  a good starting point!

3) Choose the tomatoes very carefully. They must have the right degree of ripeness. If you have an organic garden you’ll be sure to have the best result. If the tomatoes have reached the right ripeness they can be peeled easily. There is no need to plunge them in boiling water and then in cold water. This technique make some nutritional properties be irretrievably lost. The famous chef we’ve just written above suggested us to peel the raw tomatoes, remove their seeds and cut their flesh into pieces directly in the bowl not to  lose any vegetative liquid. Then you can press the tomato pieces with a fork lightly.

4) Prepare the base of tomatoes, basil and olive oil 1 hour ahead to let all these ingredients flavor.

5) Choose a great pasta. Good-quality pasta is indispensable to make every Italian pasta dish but especially a tasty pasta salad. Remember to use pasta made from semolina.

6) Choose good-quality olive oil. Its aroma and taste is indispensable to give the right “body” to your dish.

7) Combine the pasta with the tomato base and stir. Our last tip: wait for an hour before serving … and enjoy it!

Interested in all our entries about the art of cooking Italian pasta? click on the link!

Greetings from Italy

Carlo & Loretta