Fresh Spinach Pasta Salad with White Beans by Gena Hamshaw
This spinach pasta salad is a light and colorful vegan pasta dish that’s meant to be served cold. It’s dressed with a zippy red wine vinaigrette and packed with fresh spinach leaves, sun-dried tomatoes, pickled red onions, and white beans for plant protein. Best of all, the recipe is so easy to make!
This fresh spinach pasta salad is undeniably a pasta salad. Yet it leans more heavily in the direction of veggies and beans than pasta itself.
In that sense, you can think of it as being a great big salad with pasta mixed into it. Or a grain salad in which pasta is the grain.
This is a dish you can make when you’re craving a summery pasta salad, but one that isn’t weighted down by a heavy, creamy dressing.
There’s a time and a place for that, of course—for example, summer no longer feels like summer without my BLT pasta salad!
But this is a different take. A sharp red wine vinaigrette lends its lightness and acidity to the recipe.
Meanwhile, fresh baby spinach leaves make the whole dish crisp, fresh, and green. I love the color, simplicity, and nutrition of this meal. And I’m offering you as the perfect vegan pasta recipe for the last of your summer gatherings.
A 50/50 pasta and vegetable base
Most of my pasta salad recipes, like my classic macaroni salad with creamy avocado dressing, start with a good amount of cooked pasta.
This recipe incorporates cooked pasta, but it also calls for a lot of fresh, baby spinach leaves (a whole five ounces of them; you can also use chopped spinach).
The result is that the dish is truly 50% spinach salad, 50% pasta salad, all mixed into one. Best of both worlds?
A few boldly flavored pasta salad mix-ins
One of the things that I like about the spinach pasta salad recipe is that it’s simple, yet very flavorful.
This is thanks mostly to some of the mix-ins that I use, each of which is tangy, salty, umami-rich, or all of the above. These are:
Sun-dried tomato halves
Many traditional pasta salad recipes call for diced or thinly sliced, raw red onion, which is fine—but if you ask me, pickled onions pack so much more flavor.
Likewise for sun-dried tomatoes. Their concentrated, sweet and salty taste adds big character to the spinach pasta salad with little effort.
For this recipe, any soft, sun-dried tomato is fine: oil-packed, dried and rehydrated with hot liquid, or packed without oil, but soft (these are my personal favorite lately).
Then there’s the vinaigrette, a bold and assertive mixture that I shared earlier this summer. I love its bright acidity and hint of garlic and mustard.
However, if there’s another vinaigrette that you love or happen to have in the fridge, it’s fine to make a swap. I’d love to try the spinach pasta salad with my Greek vinaigrette and champagne vinaigrette, and I’m sure that I will over time.
What pasta do you recommend?
In terms of pasta type, you can use whichever option best suits your taste and health needs.
I tend to cook with traditional wheat pasta. This is primarily because I like its flavor and texture, but contrary to popular perception, there’s also some good nutrition to be had here.
A fun fact that I like to share with my nutrition clients is that there’s a decent amount of plant protein in regular ‘ole pasta: about 7-8 grams of protein per 2-ounce serving. That’s the same amount as a half-cup serving of beans!
However, if you’d like to maximize protein for this recipe, you could use a legume-based pasta, such as chickpea or lentil pasta, instead.
If you need to avoid gluten in your diet, then of course it’s fine to substitute your favorite gluten-free pasta variety.
And if you’d like wheat pasta with a tiny bit more fiber, a whole wheat pasta will work in the recipe, too.
When it comes to pasta shape, you could opt for any medium or medium-small variety. Some pastas that could work well for the spinach pasta salad are:
elbows
cavatappi
orechiette
fusilli or rotini
mezze rigatoni
penne
Farfalle, or bowtie, pasta, is a perfect medium-sized pasta shape to mix with spinach leaves.
Me? I love to use farfalle, also known as bow tie pasta, when I make this dish. The medium size and flat shape of the bow ties makes them really good for mixing in with oval-shaped, flat baby spinach leaves. And their nooks and crannies catch some of the white beans that are folded into the recipe.
Is any white bean OK?
If you read this blog regularly, then you know that I love making recipes with white beans.
“White beans” is really a way of describing a family of beans that includes great northern beans, navy beans, cannellini beans, and butter beans.
These beans have similar health offerings—protein, fiber, folate, iron, some calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and zinc—and creamy texture.
It’s fine to use any of them in the spinach pasta salad, or to substitute black beans or chickpeas, if that’s what you have at home.
Adding a bean here turns this meal into a power plate: beans for protein (and some complex carbs, too), pasta for energizing complex carbs, vinaigrette as a healthful source of mono- and polyunsaturated fats, and lots of veggies.
How to make fresh spinach pasta salad
This is the epitome of an easy, mix-together meal.
Step 1: Make-ahead components
The only key thing to be aware of is that you should make the pickled red onions in advance, so that they have time to get nice and pickle-y.
Quick pickles, aka refrigerator pickles, live up to their name in being fast to prepare, but their flavor intensifies with time.
Quick pickled onions can be ready in as little as 30-60 minutes, but they become even more flavorful over the course of days or weeks.
Vinaigrettes that contain fresh herbs, garlic, or minced shallot need to be stored in the fridge in an airtight container. There, they will last for up to a week.
I also recommend making the vinaigrette a day or two in advance, as it, too, will become more flavorful with some storage.
A nice bonus of doing some advance preparation for the spinach pasta salad is that it’ll make creating the finished dish a breeze.
Step 2: Boil your pasta
This is essentially the only cooking step that’s required for the recipe.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and cook your pasta according to package instructions. The cooking time will vary a bit with the type of pasta that you choose, but 8-12 minutes is standard.
When the pasta has reached your preferred texture (some folks like quite al dente, whereas I like my pasta a bit softer), drain it. Run the cooked pasta under cold water for about 1 minute, then drain it well again.
Step 3: Mix and serve
Now it’s time to mix all of the pasta salad ingredients together.
Use a big, roomy mixing bowl for this recipe, so that you can squeeze in the spinach, cooked pasta, beans, onions, and tomatoes.
Add six tablespoons of vinaigrette to start, then mix the salad and taste it. At this point, you can add extra vinaigrette or adjust the seasonings to taste.
With most of my salads, pasta salads included, I like to start with a modest amount of dressing and increase as needed. You can always add, but you can’t subtract.
Start with six tablespoons of red wine vinaigrette for the spinach pasta salad, then mix well. Taste the salad and add as much extra dressing (or salt, or pepper) as you like.
At this point, you can serve the spinach pasta salad or store it.
The spinach pasta salad can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for up to three days, which makes it a good dish to make ahead for parties or gatherings.
Meal prep & storage time
You can make the pasta salad ahead of time and store it in the fridge for up to three days. The spinach will soften a bit with longer storage, but three days is a good window of freshness.
Because there are fresh veggies involved, and they shouldn’t lose their texture or crispness, I don’t recommend this recipe for freezing.
Fresh Spinach Pasta Salad with White Beans (Vegan)
Ingredients
Instructions
Pasta salad isn’t only a summer dish. Come September and October, I love to make my arugula pesto pasta salad with autumnal butternut squash.
Still, I tend to think of this meal as being the quintessential warm weather lunch, as easygoing as it is delicious, cooling and filling at the same time.
Spinach pasta salad really puts the “salad” in pasta salad, and it’s been a favorite of mine this year. I hope you’ll get a chance to enjoy it before the season ends!
xo
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