No Cook Pasta Ideas

By Joelene

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)."