This tagliatelle salad is one of my favorite summer recipes. I made it with fresh homemade tagliatelle (you can see the recipe here), but of course, you can combine any type of pasta with these ingredients. I love homemade pasta, fresh of dried, it doesn’t matter, it just tastes great. I cannot say which one I prefer the most, dried of fresh pasta, although the fresh pasta absorbs more sauce and it has a softer texture. As I said before in other posts, I hate the cleaning up part, so if you hate it too, this is the perfect recipe.

Here in Italy, the pasta salad is one of the most popular summer recipes, not just because there is a great variety of ingredients that you can prepare it with, but also because it is an easy and quick recipe to cook, so you can avoid having to stay near the stove much during the hot summer days… I’m not one of those who say that you must not rinse the pasta when preparing pasta salad. When you rinse it under the cold water you stop the cooking process because pasta for this kind of recipes needs to be “al dente”, and another thing why you should rinse the pasta is that I’m sure you don’t want it to have that starchy coating…  But if you don’t want to rinse it, just put it on a baking sheet, spray with some olive oil and wait until it cools down. I usually take the pasta out of the fridge at least 15 minutes before serving and then I adjust it with salt and pepper. For pasta salad, I prefer short pasta, but this time I had fresh tagliatelle in the fridge so I used these, it was delicious anyway, although I have to admit that I still prefer short pasta 🙂

Let me know what you think if you try this recipe! Enjoy your pasta! 🙂