Easy Pasta Salad Recipe With Ginger (With Video)

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna make a ginger miso pasta salad.

And what I’m gonna use today is some brown rice fusilli it looks just like regular fusilli but it’s made from brown rice flour instead of wheat flour so it is gluten free for those of you who needs to be off of gluten and it is also wheat free for those who can’t eat wheat. Also its just plain yummy!

I find it a nice alternative to wheat pasta for some of the lighter kinds of sauces that you wanna do because it doesn’t taste as heavy if you ever notice when you have whole wheat pasta it really feels heavy and it has a fairly heavy kind of taste.

For a rice pasta on the other hand, very light, not heavy feeling in your digestive system. Brown rice is one of the most easily digested grains so most people should be fine with it and for those of you who are worried about what they say on the ingredients, trace of egg from the manufacturing facility. This for whatever reason is one of the brands of pasta I noticed does not say that at all.

It says “manufactured in a gluten free and nut free factory premise” and it’s actually a Canadian product with quality US grown brown rice. Anyway, this is called Riceopia, kind of like the utopia of rice. So gets some water heating up here with a little bit of (I haven’t put it in yet) a little bit of salts in the water to help the cooking process of the pasta.

And with brown rice pasta it cooks a little bit differently, it doesn’t cook very well out of full boil, if you ever cook it before, this or the corn pasta if you cooked them in full boil they’re gonna get really sticky and gooey and fall apart and they’re not very good.

Reason being they don’t cook properly out of full boil. What you wanna do is put this is in just before it gets to boil. It will bring the boil down a little bit and then let it come back up. Add some water to break the boil then let it come back into a boil add a bit more cold water, break the boil, bring it back down.

And just keep doing that until the pasta is actually cooked and you’ll notice that it won’t be as sticky, it will be a little bit firmer, like a wheat pasta.

So while we get our pasta cooking we’re gonna get our dressing first and then we’ll chopped up the vegetables and what I’m starting with is some ginger that I grated on my ginger grater you can see that it has teeth but the teeth don’t go through the grater.

If I flip it over you can see its solid. Reason being this is the best way to get the juice out of the ginger because you have this pulp and if watch while I squeeze it the juice comes running out.

This is the best way to use ginger raw and it brings really intense ginger flavor without a lot of the heat that you normally get with the ginger.

So squeeze that all out there then we’re going to add some miso, oh! and this grater I pick this one up for probably ten bucks really affordable and a great investment because I love the juice from the ginger.

So miso looks like this, it is a fermented soy bean paste which really does not sound like appetizing but it tastes really nice. It brings a nice saltiness and a bit of a thicker texture to your sauce because it is a paste.

Now I usually don’t use soy products but the fermented one such as miso, they break down the part of the soy bean that we cannot digest so I do like to use miso.

So I got some brown rice vinegar, some untoasted sesame oil, you can see it’s not the dark brown color, a little more secrecy. It’s not the dark brown color of the toasted sesame oil which I’m gonna put in next.

If you don’t have untoasted sesame oil, you can use just olive oil. So there’s the toasted sesame oil and I don’t use very much of that one because it’s quite strong.

Last thing I’m going to add are a little bit of chile, to bring a little bit of heat to this pasta salad. And we don’t need any salt because the miso has salt in it. (Let me get the bowl on screen) so the dark color you’re seeing in there is the toasted sesame oil.

So get this mix up and then we’re gonna chopped up our vegetables and I’m gonna do snow peas, red peppers, beans, sprouts and I would normally do green onions but because I have some really beautiful fresh chives from the garden that’s what I’m gonna put in here.

So put your veggies into the bowl with the dressing while your pasta cooks.

So all of the miso chunks have now been broken up and you can I’ve got a nice thick beautiful slightly brown dressing.

So I’ve got all these nice veggies into the bowl now hanging out with the dressing. I always give the vegetables first crack at a dressing before adding the grain or the potato or whatever is going in there because the starch type vegetables really absorbs the sauce and same thing with the grain or pasta if you put it in first its gonna take over all that beautiful dressing and not leaving any for the vegetables.

But vegetables, they’re kinda generous like that, they take some for themselves but when you add the grain, they’re gonna coat the grain as well.

So as this comes up to a boil, I just wanted to show you what happens, its boiling, it really doesn’t take much water to break it just a little bit. Give a little bit more and brown rice pasta does tend to stick so you wanna give it a stir every so often and it also will leach some of its starches out into the water so you’ll notice that the water gonna get kinda creamy looking out of white.

That’s fine, just keep doing this until it’s cooked and you’ll know it’s cooked by taking one out and giving it a taste. Not quite but getting close.

Once your pasta is cooked, drain it and I like to rinse mine off a little bit especially when I’m doing a pasta salad, use a little bit of cool water so it doesn’t heat up the vegetables and it also get the extra starch off.

Ok! Dumped it in the bowl and I like to use the fusilli shape for pasta salad, that’s the spirals, number one because it reminds me of Kramer making a pasta sculpture for Gerry that he called fusulli Gerry. Why fusulli? Coz his silly!

Anyway, also because especially for pasta salad those spirals trapped the dressing and really just suck it right in there. Get all the deliciousness right around it. So toss it through, like I said those vegetables are gonna be generous with the sauce that they have one them and get it all over those noodles, beautiful!

Last, finishing touch I’m gonna add some toasted sesame seeds to go with our sesame oils, toss that through because I’m taking this on a picnic otherwise you could top it as a garnish and there we are a gorgeous ginger miso pasta salad but different flavor for a pasta salad.

You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.