No Cook Pasta Ideas Recipe

Ingredients

Just follow these basic rules:
For no-cook sauces, dried pasta holds up better to the chunky ingredients than fresh pasta does. Use pasta made with 100 percent semolina flour.
Heartier vegetables simply need to be sliced thin or grated to allow the heat from the pasta to soften and blend.
Use room-temperature, not chilled, ingredients. To quickly warm ingredients, place in a metal bowl on top of the pasta pot while bringing water to a boil.
Dense vegetables such as broccoli can be softened by marinating for 20 minutes in olive oil and a sprinkling of salt.
Toss the pasta immediately after removing from the water to allow the noodles to absorb the full flavor of the sauce ingredients.
Pasta continues to absorb liquid, so be sure to add at least 1/4 cup boiling pasta water to the no-cook sauce to keep the noodles loose and prevent them from sticking together.
Add fat, whether extra-virgin olive oil, butter or sesame oil, to help blend ingredients and lubricate the noodles.

Preparation

Step 1

Recipes for no-cook pasta are forgiving. Substitute escarole for arugula. Top dishes with pine nuts, dried fruits or Parmesan cheese. Most no-cook dishes are vegetarian, but smoked fishes, thin slices of Italian hams and fresh cooked shrimp work well.

"You don't really need to follow a recipe. Just make sure the sauce ingredients complement each other," said Joie Warner, author of No-Cook Pasta Sauces.

She also recommends looking to the pantry for ingredients - from canned tuna to sun-dried tomato pesto to white kidney beans.

Whatever the ingredients, use the best and freshest available.

"If the tomatoes aren't good," she said, "neither will the sauce (be)."