You've Been Adding Wine To Your Pasta Salad All Wrong

Pasta salad is the perfect picnic, lunch, or dinner table addition. Whether you love it because it can be made ahead of time, or just the fact that it includes pasta — it's simply a classic dish. There are many ingredients that can upgrade your pasta salad, and a flavorful wine is one of them. But how you incorporate wine into pasta salad matters.

Matthew Cutolo, a third-generation Italian-American Chef at Gargiulo's Restaurant in Coney Island, Brooklyn, N.Y. gave us some exclusive tips on how to add wine to pasta salad. Cutolo's advice is to first pick a wine that you would drink, which is an important tip for cooking with alcohol. Chef Cutolo prefers a pinot grigio or Chardonnay for cooking, saying: "They are both dryer white wines and don't overwhelm the flavor of the sauce but rather enhance it." Once you've picked a dry wine based on the other ingredients in your pasta salad, there is a technique for incorporating it into the sauce.

You might think that you can add a splash wine to your pasta salad right before serving, as you would with cheese or herbs. However, allowing the alcohol to cook off and reduce in the sauce will make for a much tastier pasta salad. Chef Matthew Cutolo says, "You can use wine to saute tomatoes and calamari together, chill that and then add that to cold pasta with arugula and a good extra virgin olive oil."

Cooking your sauce with wine will make the pasta salad simply taste better. Alcohol helps releases flavor molecules in foods, something that other liquids and fats cannot do. When you're cooking the sauce, make sure it reduces by half. This will get rid of any alcohol taste, plus concentrate and enhance the flavors of your sauce. With Chef Cutolo's advice and some dry white wine, a restaurant quality pasta salad is just a saute away.