Pasta Salad with Tuna

Or is it tuna salad with pasta?

This was our last supper before leaving for France a few weeks ago. There are few things better than dinner on the beach on a beautiful evening.

Pasta salads have a bad reputation, but lately, I see a lot of people trying to defend them. I am joining the chorus, because let’s face it, sometimes a plate of pasta salad is the perfect warm-weather meal. 

That’s partly because pasta salads are incredibly portable, making them ideal for picnics and travel. They’re also easy to throw together and ripe for improvisation. Plus, they make a good repository for leftovers.

In fact, using up leftovers was exactly how this particular salad was born. As I was making dinner one night, I opened the fridge. I saw three things right at eye level: a small piece of grilled tuna from the night before, the oil-cured olives I always keep on hand, and some leftover cooked farro ditalini (more on that later). 

Inspiration struck, and I decided to whip up a little appetizer with these ingredients and a few others. I posted the results on my Instagram Stories that night, and got such a strong positive reaction that I thought I’d better work this into a real recipe and share it with you guys here!

But first, you may be wondering: how did pasta salads get such a bad reputation? I’ll tell you. The blame lies with so many fusilli or penne salads, drenched in vinegar and sitting for hours on end in a deli case or salad bar, bulked up with ingredients that are not very fresh or interesting, served ice cold. That’s how. 

Maybe we should rebrand these dishes as “room-temperature pastas” and treat them with some reverence, like an Italian would.

In my first rendition of this salad, I didn’t add tomatoes — and it was great without them — but I liked it even more with them. Pasta salads are usually colorful, but I quite like the monotone that I had going here.

As in any pasta dish, the shape of the pasta here is important. I like ditalini for this salad, because size-wise, it easily integrates with the rest of the ingredients, and it’s very forkable, allowing for mouthfuls that contain a little of everything. The amount of pasta is important too. This is not pasta dressed with a few ingredients and garnishes. This is a salad where the pasta itself is more of a garnish, adding heft and chew to a tasty mix of ingredients. 

Here’s my go-to pasta for this salad and many other dishes. I always keep it on hand. It’s hard to find a good whole-grain pasta. This is one of the best I’ve tried.

While a white ditalini will work just fine here, I especially love this particular farro ditalini. I buy it at Eataly in NYC, which is where I discovered it, but it’s also available online. It has a great nutty flavor and, unlike many whole-grain pastas, it’s chewy, not mushy. I always have a box in my pantry, and I use it in soups, salads, and pasta dishes. It works especially well with a meat- or veggie-based bolognese-style sauce. Pure comfort!

You can be flexible with this recipe, though! Feel free to swap in any other small pasta shape. You can also get by without fresh tuna here, though it’s pretty great. Use a good-quality canned tuna instead! I used leftover cooked tuna the first time I made this. The second time, I grilled up a piece expressly to make the salad. Either way! If you had leftover cooked swordfish, that would work well too. I hope you made the garlic scape pesto from a few weeks back, but if not, use a homemade or store-bought basil pesto instead. Store-bought is fine!

This is a perfect vacation week dish, and I do hope you’re on vacation!

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Subs and riffs

• Try fennel instead of celery

• Use canned tuna (the good kind, packed in oil) instead of fresh

• Try another cooked meaty fish, like swordfish, instead of tuna

• Use kalamata or Castelvetrano olives instead of the oil-cured olives

• Add some anchovy paste to amp up the flavor

• Use a dab of Calabrian chile paste instead of the red pepper flakes to add heat

• Add tomatoes (I used halved sungolds)

• Use white ditalini or whole-grain pasta

• Use another small pasta shape instead of ditalini

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Pasta Salad with Tuna