charred corn & green onion miso pasta salad
with or without bacon!
Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone! We are grilling out by a pool with some friends today and I’m bringing THIS RECIPE! This one was a labor of love — I must have tested 15 different variations of this recipe before arriving here. I LOVE THIS PASTA SALAD!!
If a pasta salad recipe doesn’t sound exciting to you… I get it. Pasta salad can really suck sometimes. Mayo-y, flavorless, full of weird olives and/or tasteless tomatoes. Not this one though!!! This one tastes bright and zippy and is something so fun and new to bring to the table.
OK I decided that, just this once, I’d bend the What To Cook rules a tiny bit. WTC is always a complete meal, and I know that we all typically view pasta salad as a side dish. This recipe can definitely serve as a great side (bring it to your summer cookouts!), but it’s also SO ROBUST and so flavorful that it makes an excellent meal all on its own.
Plus, it’s easy to add more protein if you want! You can stir in a pound of crumbled cooked bacon (I tried this and it’s fab), toss in shredded chicken from a store-bought rotisserie chicken, or add a can of rinsed and drained white beans.
You can also serve it along with any grilled meat — steak, chicken, shrimp, pork tenderloin, whatever you’re in the mood for. Check out our ultimate grill guide for back-pocket marinades and the cook times for any type of protein you might be craving.
Today’s charred corn and scallion pasta salad gets a lot of its personality from miso paste. Miso is a Japanese fermented paste that packs a TON of flavor — it’s salty, sweet, and savory all at once.
There are different types, and they vary in taste based on things like fermentation time, which grains are included (soybeans, rice, barley, etc.), salt content, and more. For this recipe I’m calling for white miso paste, also known as “shiro miso.” It has a mild, sweet, and creamy flavor that’s perfect for dressings and marinades. If you have another kind of miso paste in the fridge already, you can use that instead.
There’s really no sub that I trust for miso paste in this recipe — it is such a heavy lifter here! White miso paste contains soy, and sometimes contains gluten too (read the labels while shopping — some brands do, some don’t), but here’s a chickpea miso paste that would be a great option, should you have a soy allergy! See the notes section for more info if you can’t eat gluten.
If this is your first time shopping for miso paste, you should be able to find it either in the international foods aisle or in the refrigerated areas near tofu, or you can order it online (Amazon, Thrive).
After you’ve fallen in love with the sweet and savory umami flavor of miso paste, you should use it in this sheet-pan miso-ginger salmon! It’s a nutritious, easy, delightful one-pan dinner. For another pasta dinner that makes the most of summer’s crop of corn, cook my creamy corn pasta! Note that this one’s a warm pasta meal rather than a cold/room temp pasta salad. Lastly, the pasta salad riff on my mob wife salad is excellent! Find it in the notes section beneath the recipe.
Serves 6 to 8
Cook time: 25 minutes
Tools:
Colander
Large serving bowl
Cast-iron skillet (or another heavy-bottomed skillet)
Ingredients:
16 ounces short pasta (farfalle, fusilli, gemelli, or cavatappi)
