Making a Delicious Pasta Salad with Romesco Sauce and Fresh Tomatoes

As I sit down to make this pasta salad, I realize that it's been a while since my mom has called me. She always makes an effort to reach out, even if it's just to say hello and catch up on life. I feel old when I don't hear from her as often as I'd like, but at the same time, I'm grateful for our relationship and the fact that we can still have good conversations.

Now, let's focus on making this pasta salad. It all starts with cooking a pound of pasta in boiling water. The type of pasta I use is giant bow-tie shaped, which makes it easy to toss everything together without having to worry about individual strands getting lost in the mix. Once the pasta is cooked, I drain it and set it aside, waiting for the sauce to come together.

While the pasta cooks, I prepare the rest of the ingredients. This includes chopping a generous amount of parmesan cheese - four ounces should do the trick. I'm quite particular about my parmesan, as I like to choose the piece with the smallest amount of mold or unwanted bits. There's nothing worse than biting into a chunky piece of parmesan that's supposed to be smooth and creamy.

Next up is the walnuts. These need to be chopped finely, but not too fine - I like my textures to vary a bit in this dish. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly lazy, I'll even just use a box grater to get the job done. The result is always a nice mix of chunky and smooth bits.

Now it's time for the tomatoes. A pound should be plenty, and I like to choose heirloom varieties that have big, beautiful bowls of color on them. Today, my selection includes several different hues - green, yellow, orange, and red. Each one is about a half-pound, and they add just the right amount of sweetness, acidity, and juiciness to the dish.

With all my ingredients prepared, I can finally start assembling the salad. This involves tossing everything together with some pre-made romesco sauce (which we'll get into in a minute) until it's all coated evenly. The sauce is what really makes this recipe special - its rich, nutty flavor pairs perfectly with the pasta, tomatoes, and parmesan.

Speaking of the romesco sauce, let's take a look at how it comes together. Typically, I make my own from scratch using roasted red peppers, almonds, garlic, and olive oil. The result is a thick, velvety paste that's perfect for coating pasta without making it too soggy. In this recipe, we're reserving half of the dressing to toss through at the end, as the pasta will absorb most of it over time.

Now, let's get back to assembling our salad. I add the rest of the dressing, followed by the chopped walnuts and parmesan cheese. The bread crumbs are added on top for texture - I love how they work their way into the grooves of the pasta, creating a nice contrast in textures. Finally, I gently fold everything together, bruising just enough of the basil to release its fragrance without overpowering the other flavors.

The finished salad is stunning, with a vibrant mix of colors and textures that's sure to impress at any gathering. To serve, I simply sprinkle some fresh basil leaves on top and add a final sprinkle of breadcrumbs. And that's it - this pasta salad with romesco sauce and fresh tomatoes is ready to be devoured.

The Best Part: Using Up Those Heirloom Tomatoes

One of the best things about this recipe is the opportunity to use up those gorgeous heirloom tomatoes that are available at the farmers market during the summer. It's a shame when they come in season just for us to forget them or waste them, so I love being able to create a dish that showcases their beauty and flavor.

When it comes to preparing these tomatoes, I like to chop each one into roughly irregular shapes - this adds to the visual appeal of the salad and also helps to release their natural sweetness. A pound should be plenty, but feel free to use more if you love tomatoes as much as I do!

Now that we have all our ingredients prepared and our sauce is ready, it's time to bring everything together. I'll add a couple of basil leaves on top of the salad for garnish, followed by a final sprinkle of breadcrumbs. And that's it - this pasta salad with romesco sauce and fresh tomatoes is finally ready to be enjoyed.

Enjoying Our Handiwork

As I sit down to taste my freshly made pasta salad, I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. The combination of flavors and textures is just right - the pasta is cooked perfectly, the parmesan is salty and nutty, and those juicy tomatoes add just the right amount of sweetness.

Of course, there's nothing quite like eating something you've made yourself. There's a satisfaction that comes from knowing that every bite is a result of your own hard work and creativity. Whether it's a simple pasta salad or a more complex dish, cooking is all about experimenting and finding what works for you.

And speaking of working together - the romesco sauce really brings everything to life in this recipe. Its rich, nutty flavor complements the pasta, tomatoes, and parmesan perfectly, without overpowering any of them. It's that perfect balance of flavors that makes this dish truly special.

I hope you enjoy making and eating this pasta salad as much as I do! With its easy-to-follow recipe and delicious combination of flavors, it's sure to become a favorite in your household.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enactions that are good I know the actions using / director thing to say oh I'm pretty self-direction it's peak tomato season right now so I'm going to show you a recipe for romesco pasta salad that uses some great farmers market tomatoes it 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 textural 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 want to 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 it 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 darken 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 kind of eyeball it I'll 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 like white sourdough Pullman would work you could use a whole grain bread but I like sort of the density just a country loaf so I'm going to use the food processor to break this up into fresh bread crumbs but before that I just want to cut it into 1-inch pieces to give the food processor a little head start 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 sides will be of around a cup and a half so into the food processor and 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 want to go much finer than this and transfer these to a bowl so the walnuts are almost done I'm gonna jump over and start the dressing so I have some jarred roasted red peppers here for whole I'm gonna start with my lemon the acid in this recipe comes from lemon juice I'm going to first to zest the lemon and save that for my breadcrumbs later on I have my microplane I hope sometimes I see people with micro planning like this my own method is to kind of use it the other direction but either way it 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 I 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 the dressing so I 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 before whole roasted red peppers just from a jar to whole raw garlic cloves 1/2 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 the sort of the colder temperature 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 that volume to coat everything and once this mixture is smooth I'll start to process it I'll stream in the oil I also love the kind of vibe reddish-orange to you that it gives the whole pasta salad it feels very summery with the tomatoes and that's the contrast from the basil so into the feed tube of this stream in the oil am i streaming and 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 salads 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 at my measuring cup where I have the oil now I'm gonna take my breadcrumbs over to the stove and start to crisp those and turn 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 Gigante 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 that not only all the sauce but all of those other components in there like the chopped walnuts and the breadcrumbs and everything all my pastas cooking I'm also going to crisps my bread crumbs so I'm gonna bring the bread crumbs and my lemon zest over to this stove set that here so very often when we give a pasta recipe we say to under cook 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 want to cook it fully in your water even a little bit past al dente because as it cools sound the pasta will firm up so into the water this doesn't have a time on it I'm going to 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 ok so that's going and then I'm gonna turn put some heat under this saucepan I'll put that clicking stops no all right we'll go to this burner so I'll get a medium heat under this saucepan then I have two tablespoons of olive oil once the oil is hot and you can tell because it will shimmer a little bit across the surface in go the breadcrumbs and I also chose the breadcrumbs with another 1/2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes and then that finely grated lemon zest from the lemon so you want to keep this moving in the in the pot because if you kind of let it sit oftentimes you'll get some burning around the edges we just want to 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 do that I'm not really doing either one very well I'm actually extremely left-handed and 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 the back over to the station with me so it's been 10 minutes I want to show you a test for pasta doneness that I mean obviously you 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 as 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 I'm not quite done when I was a kid I loved eating raw pasta was weird I don't know why I don't know why that was enjoyable okay someone's calling me hold on you know I don't know who it is anyway sorry it's not my mom my mom does call me cuz I feel old the day though she's like oh I'm so glad you answered okay over to the pasta so at this point it's fully cooked none of that start to 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 want to keep it nice and loose and coating the pasta then I'll shake that off also I didn't mention this before but this is one pound of pasta I'm a giant bowl and in goes the pasta and a bowl the size is really helpful because there's a lot of ingredients to toss together so at this stage I'm going to toss the pasta with about half of the dressing I'm not adding all the dressing for a couple reasons one over time the pasta will really kind of absorb that dressing and 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 it's a nice generous amount I'm the person in the grocery store because 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 Rhine so I feel like I'm getting the most for my money like my dad would be proud you know there's a lot of different kind of grades of harm and I love the parm that has those big crystals in it like this so you kind of can taste them as you're as you crunch down on them same with the breadcrumbs I like having all the pieces be kind of irregular I'm not like 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 just find it easier to chop then getting out like a box grater I'm going to move this off to the side and now to do my walnuts same thing when you chop nuts you kind of inevitably get some bits that like turn to dust my favorite part of this recipe the tomatoes they've this big beautiful bowl of heirloom tomatoes and I need about a pound you could use cherry tomatoes is fine that would be great you I like using heirlooms because you can kind of cut them into these nice irregular shapes so that's it 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 anything 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 you 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 going to 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 the tomatoes the nuts and the parm you know bread crumbs sprinkle these on top and I know it said it before but I just love the way the bread crumbs in particular kind of worked 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 want to bruise the basil too much now I'm ready to make a plate a couple of basil leaves on top and then just a final sprinkle of breadcrumbs Andy your taste of pasta salad no pasta with romesco sauce fresh tomatoes yeah yeah right we finally get to eat tomatoes when it's tomato season which for us is kind of a rare thing yeah 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 of those awesome Tomatoes at the farmers market so thanks for watching yeah we would eat like strands of spaghetti really or like yeah I think my parents are just like you're annoying us we're trying to make dinner chew on this and I'd be like okayactions that are good I know the actions using / director thing to say oh I'm pretty self-direction it's peak tomato season right now so I'm going to show you a recipe for romesco pasta salad that uses some great farmers market tomatoes it 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 textural 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 want to 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 it 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 darken 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 kind of eyeball it I'll 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 like white sourdough Pullman would work you could use a whole grain bread but I like sort of the density just a country loaf so I'm going to use the food processor to break this up into fresh bread crumbs but before that I just want to cut it into 1-inch pieces to give the food processor a little head start 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 sides will be of around a cup and a half so into the food processor and 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 want to go much finer than this and transfer these to a bowl so the walnuts are almost done I'm gonna jump over and start the dressing so I have some jarred roasted red peppers here for whole I'm gonna start with my lemon the acid in this recipe comes from lemon juice I'm going to first to zest the lemon and save that for my breadcrumbs later on I have my microplane I hope sometimes I see people with micro planning like this my own method is to kind of use it the other direction but either way it 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 I 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 the dressing so I 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 before whole roasted red peppers just from a jar to whole raw garlic cloves 1/2 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 the sort of the colder temperature 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 that volume to coat everything and once this mixture is smooth I'll start to process it I'll stream in the oil I also love the kind of vibe reddish-orange to you that it gives the whole pasta salad it feels very summery with the tomatoes and that's the contrast from the basil so into the feed tube of this stream in the oil am i streaming and 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 salads 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 at my measuring cup where I have the oil now I'm gonna take my breadcrumbs over to the stove and start to crisp those and turn 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 Gigante 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 that not only all the sauce but all of those other components in there like the chopped walnuts and the breadcrumbs and everything all my pastas cooking I'm also going to crisps my bread crumbs so I'm gonna bring the bread crumbs and my lemon zest over to this stove set that here so very often when we give a pasta recipe we say to under cook 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 want to cook it fully in your water even a little bit past al dente because as it cools sound the pasta will firm up so into the water this doesn't have a time on it I'm going to 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 ok so that's going and then I'm gonna turn put some heat under this saucepan I'll put that clicking stops no all right we'll go to this burner so I'll get a medium heat under this saucepan then I have two tablespoons of olive oil once the oil is hot and you can tell because it will shimmer a little bit across the surface in go the breadcrumbs and I also chose the breadcrumbs with another 1/2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes and then that finely grated lemon zest from the lemon so you want to keep this moving in the in the pot because if you kind of let it sit oftentimes you'll get some burning around the edges we just want to 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 do that I'm not really doing either one very well I'm actually extremely left-handed and 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 the back over to the station with me so it's been 10 minutes I want to show you a test for pasta doneness that I mean obviously you 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 as 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 I'm not quite done when I was a kid I loved eating raw pasta was weird I don't know why I don't know why that was enjoyable okay someone's calling me hold on you know I don't know who it is anyway sorry it's not my mom my mom does call me cuz I feel old the day though she's like oh I'm so glad you answered okay over to the pasta so at this point it's fully cooked none of that start to 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 want to keep it nice and loose and coating the pasta then I'll shake that off also I didn't mention this before but this is one pound of pasta I'm a giant bowl and in goes the pasta and a bowl the size is really helpful because there's a lot of ingredients to toss together so at this stage I'm going to toss the pasta with about half of the dressing I'm not adding all the dressing for a couple reasons one over time the pasta will really kind of absorb that dressing and 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 it's a nice generous amount I'm the person in the grocery store because 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 Rhine so I feel like I'm getting the most for my money like my dad would be proud you know there's a lot of different kind of grades of harm and I love the parm that has those big crystals in it like this so you kind of can taste them as you're as you crunch down on them same with the breadcrumbs I like having all the pieces be kind of irregular I'm not like 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 just find it easier to chop then getting out like a box grater I'm going to move this off to the side and now to do my walnuts same thing when you chop nuts you kind of inevitably get some bits that like turn to dust my favorite part of this recipe the tomatoes they've this big beautiful bowl of heirloom tomatoes and I need about a pound you could use cherry tomatoes is fine that would be great you I like using heirlooms because you can kind of cut them into these nice irregular shapes so that's it 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 anything 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 you 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 going to 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 the tomatoes the nuts and the parm you know bread crumbs sprinkle these on top and I know it said it before but I just love the way the bread crumbs in particular kind of worked 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 want to bruise the basil too much now I'm ready to make a plate a couple of basil leaves on top and then just a final sprinkle of breadcrumbs Andy your taste of pasta salad no pasta with romesco sauce fresh tomatoes yeah yeah right we finally get to eat tomatoes when it's tomato season which for us is kind of a rare thing yeah 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 of those awesome Tomatoes at the farmers market so thanks for watching yeah we would eat like strands of spaghetti really or like yeah I think my parents are just like you're annoying us we're trying to make dinner chew on this and I'd be like okay\n"