Your Macaroni Salad Is Missing One Briny Addition

All-American macaroni salad is a tried-and-true favorite, whether it's served at a family reunion or at a backyard barbecue with friends. Typically made with elbow pasta, diced veggies, and tossed in a mayo-based dressing, macaroni salad is usually served cold. Savory, sweet, and delicious, this dish has the ability to make you salivate just at the thought of it. But the next time you go to make a batch of macaroni salad, you might want to consider one crunchy, tangy addition: diced pickles. 

Whether you're a pickle aficionado or not, this twist on macaroni salad is a game changer anyone can get behind. Depending on what kind of pickles you choose, adding this briny ingredient can give your macaroni salad herby, garlicky, or spicy notes (depending on the type you choose) and create a zingy side dish for summertime meals. Pickles can also help with cutting through rich mayo-based dressing, lightening what could otherwise be a heavy dish and giving your pasta salad balance. 

When making macaroni salad with diced pickles, choose your pickles wisely. Spicy southern pickles will add a nice kick to your salad. A dill pickle will add a little sourness to the mix, and a sweet pickle will temper some of the acidic elements of this salad. Of course, you can also do a combination of spicy and sour or sweet and spicy. Additionally, diced pickles will add a lovely textural contrast to your macaroni salad. Their crisp, crunchy bite is perfectly juxtaposed against the pasta's relative softness and the dressing's creaminess.

If you really want to optimize this ingredient for maximum effect, there's a way take it up a notch. Pickles get their flavor from the brine they are packed in, so consider adding a splash to the dressing. A basic pickle brine is generally comprised of vinegar, water, sugar, salt, other seasonings and aromatics. These complex flavors make pickle brine an excellent acid for making a salad dressing.

Pickles aren't the only thing you can add to your macaroni salad. Ranch dressing is the perfect dipping sauce for fried pickles, so it makes perfect sense that you could change up your pasta salad dressing with a buttermilk ranch version to complement your diced pickle. This savory, creamy dressing relies on herbs like dill, chives, parsley and cilantro to enrichen its taste, so naturally, these flavors will heighten and enhance the taste of your chopped pickles, as well as your other ingredients.    

But keep in mind that pickles are pretty sodium-rich, so make sure you're judicious with how much of this ingredient you add to your salad mix. The flavor will intensify as your salad chills in the fridge, and your pasta noodles absorb some of that salt. As long as you're careful to avoid overloading your macaroni salad with too many pickles, you're in store for a macaroni salad with the perfect zing.