Ditch The Mayo: Give Pasta Salad A Calcium & Flavor Boost With One Ingredient

Mayonnaise is the thick and creamy matrix that disperses all the other flavors in your pasta salad, coating the noodles and giving the dish a great texture when cold. But if you want more of that tangy, rich flavor, plus a decent boost of calcium, try blending feta with vinaigrette next time for a tasty result.

Feta is a crumbly, tangy cheese with plenty of fat and salt, making it intensely flavorful but also creamy under the right circumstances. When you blend it with a premade vinaigrette, you create a beautifully bright condiment that pairs quite well with just about any type of pasta, from whole wheat to semolina. Unlike mayo, it combines the smooth decadence of dairy fat with fermented complexity and has a thinner texture that sinks into the nooks and crannies of different noodle shapes. While tasty, the ingredients still pair quite well with other pasta salad secret ingredients, from curry powder to various vegetables, so you won't need to switch up your recipe too much.

Daily recommended calcium intake varies quite a bit based on age and other factors, but it starts at around 1,000 milligrams a day for most adults. Getting this much can be a challenge, but feta has about 270 milligrams per 60-gram serving, or about half a cup. Compared to the practically zero milligrams found in mayonnaise, this is an easy way to convert pasta salad into something not only more flavorful, but also more nutritionally complex.

Pasta salad is a pretty flexible recipe, with no real standard ingredients outside of the carb in its name and a dressing. This means you don't have to choose between flavor and nutrition, and there are plenty of ingredients that can check both boxes quite easily.

The false assumption everyone makes about milk is that it's the be-all and end-all of calcium-rich foods, but there are plenty of vegetables rich in the nutrient. A single cup of cooked spinach can add a whopping 240 milligrams of calcium and tastes fantastic with a feta-vinaigrette dressing. It's also quite an unobtrusive vegetable that has little effect on your dish's flavor profile, adding subtle grassy notes that make the end result more complex. If you want to bulk out the texture instead, a cup of cooked broccoli adds about 60 milligrams of calcium and creates a deliciously chewy texture when left a bit crunchy.

Pasta salads are all about selecting the right pasta shape for your dressing. Since this vinaigrette is a bit runnier than mayo, you'll want to stick with varieties that are short and curly, creating enough surface area for it to cling to. While varieties made with traditional ingredients only have about 18 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams, whole grain pasta has 28 milligrams and a more rustic flavor. This can help balance out the acidity of the dressing, giving the dish a great mix of brightness and earthiness.