Leaner macaroni salad a new take on summer classic

When it comes to summer salads, a cool and creamy, sweet and tangy macaroni salad rates as one of my favorites.

I do love a good ol' American potato salad, but it can be such a hassle to make - cooking the potatoes, cool the potatoes, peel and dice the potatoes.

Although macaroni requires cooking (usually 7 minutes), it cools down quickly. Plus, there's no peeling or dicing. Most pasta salad ingredients need rinsing, trimming and chopping, but that takes no longer than those headed for a potato salad. Bottom line, macaroni salad saves time and money (one pound uncooked macaroni costs far less than two or three pounds of potatoes).

I recently got the hankering for macaroni salad but before I trotted out my favorite recipe, I detoured to my cookbook library to visit with one of my favorite authors, Pam Anderson. Anderson thoroughly covered pasta salads in 2002's "CookSmart." She taught me that pasta, especially for a pasta salad, needs to be cooked in lots of well-salted water.

In her book, Anderson notes that a pound of pasta cooked in less than a gallon of water gets slightly gummy - not good. And, she liked the flavor that heavily salted cooking water imparted to properly cooked pasta. She definitely did not like the way pasta-headed-for-a-salad tasted when cooked in a blend of water and chicken broth.

I set about reworking my own favorite macaroni salad by first cooking a half-pound of imported elbow macaroni (De Cecco) as Anderson suggested, in a gallon of briskly boiling water to which I'd added two tablespoons kosher salt.

Anderson found that cooked pasta cooled in a cold water left the noodles waterlogged and bland, so she recommends spreading the cooked pasta in a shallow baking pan (like a nonstick jelly roll pan) to bring it fairly quickly to room temperature. That method also dries the pasta slightly, allowing the dressing to cling perfectly. That process worked well for me.

If cooked vegetables are part of a pasta salad, Anderson recommends cooking them briefly in the same water as the pasta and cooling them in the same pan as the pasta.

Anderson's cooling method also benefits lean folks; since the cooled pasta doesn't need oil drizzled on it to keep it from sticking; the dressing unsticks the pasta just fine.

To keep the oil and vinegar in the dressing from separating and giving the pasta a sour note, she blends the vinaigrette into mayonnaise, Dijon mustard or sour cream to emulsify it. My reduced-fat mayonnaise- and sour cream-based dressing had no such problem.

Once chilled, I tasted my new macaroni salad and not only liked it's flavor, but how much better my macaroni tasted. Give it a try.

• Don Mauer welcomes questions and recipe makeover requests. Write him at don@theleanwizard.com.