Horrified at the thought of a pasta dish with fruit? Try these fusilli (or rotini!) with melon and you'll think again.
Risotto with strawberries or blueberries is one of the most delicate and sophisticated first courses to serve when you feel like surprising your guests. So why not try combing the classic pasta with a typical summer fruit like melon?
It’s not a hot dish, this is an excellent pasta salad to eat on hot summer days, super simple to prepare, and very practical to take with you to work. Together let's uncover the ingredients and recipe.
Which pasta to choose
Let's start at the beginning and the type of pasta to choose.
We recommend a short pasta because in this recipe the sauce isn’t all-absorbing so spaghetti would be too dry. Since this pasta will be eaten cold, pennette, rotini, but also orecchiette and gnocchetti sardi are conserved better than linguini or tagliatelle.
You can replace pasta with cereals if you want a more nutritious and richer meal or even opt for wholemeal pasta, great cold, and perfect in combination with fresh raw ingredients like in this case.
How to recognize a good melon
First, look at it. It shouldn’t be bruised and must have a uniformly colored surface.
Touch it to see if it’s firm, or if too soft then discard it.
Then holding it close to your nose, if you can smell it, it's the right one.
Melon pasta salad recipe
The process is really simple, you just need to assemble the ingredients.
Once cooked al dente, drain the pasta and let it cool, seasoned only with a little EVOO.
Then add some Tropea onion, plenty of basil, some melon cubes (or balls for a more elegant presentation), slices of avocado (quite soft), but not too much, and some mozzarella.
You can also use pesto to give more flavor to the pasta and legumes if you want to enrich it. Chickpeas, for example, would be perfect because they give that crunchy texture which is always appreciated in a cold dish.
Rice salad with melon, why not?
Perfect presentation
If you want to present this remarkably simple recipe to your guests, do it properly and serve it inside a melon cut in two parts and emptied of the flesh.
You'll get some really nice single-portion bowls to present.
Obviously, the melon pulp should be reused in the topping and nothing should be thrown away, not even the seeds which can be washed, dried, and baked in the oven with oil and salt.