The Best High Protein Pasta Salad |

I haven't eaten pasta salad in years but here I just dropped this new spiral noodle that might be changing that. So today I'm going to try it for the first time and see if we're going to be able to add this pasta recipe back into the potluck rotation. Hi I'm Tina and on this channel I share low-carb high-protein recipes that taste good. I eat this way because I have to. I have reactive hypoglycemia and a low-carb diet is the treatment. So I have been making this pasta salad for at 20 years. I've taken it to cookouts, I've taken it to work potlucks, to family events and I just figured when I went low-carb it was gone for good. But we're going to see if Hero is bringing it back to life today. So we're going to start with the pasta so it has a chance to cool down while we're chopping up the rest of the ingredients. Now before being low-carb this is the pasta that I use. I use that tri-color one and this one is a 12 ounce box. Now the Hero one is so new that they're still in white boxes but they did send a card with all the detailed information and this box is eight ounces. So I am going to cook one and a half boxes just so that I have the right amount of pasta for the ingredients that I had. Can anyone remember when this used to be 16 ounces though? All right so we're going to boil that in eight cups of water with a heavy pinch of salt in there and you typically boil them per the instructions for five minutes. I like to go an extra two minutes on my pasta salad just because when you put the pasta if you cook it al dente and you put it in the fridge then it gets rubbery when that starch seizes up in there or it hardens up when it gets cold and so your noodle will get rubbery. But if you cook it for just two extra minutes and soak in some more water then when you put it in the fridge and that starch hardens up then you're going to have just the right al dente texture. So I'm going to cook these for seven minutes and we'll be right back. Okay so I got the pasta off the stove and drained and it's going to sit here and cool while we work on the rest of the ingredients. I am truly curious though how many of y'all rinse your pasta for a cold pasta salad? Now I never rinse the pasta for hot sauce so that the sauce will grab onto it but I've always been taught to rinse a cold pasta salad so I'm just genuinely curious what everybody else does. Just drop me a comment down below and let me know. All right so let's talk about some ingredients real quick. I am using the Applegate turkey pepperoni to keep calories and nitrates down. I'm going to cut these into quarters just so that they're smaller and easier to bite into in the salad. But what I did used to use and they're very convenient are these little round little pepperonis. So if you have access to these they're super quick and easy to just dump in the pasta salad so I kind of like this option. Also I use banana peppers in this recipe but if you want something a little tangier or deli-er kind of tasting you can of course choose a pepperoncini. Those work in this salad as well. Now this is a very forgiving pasta salad and of course you can swap out the ingredients that you like the best. I chose an orange bell pepper. I typically stick to the red yellow and orange because they're sweeter and I chose orange today only because I have red from the pepperoni and yellow from the banana pepper so I just wanted a contrasting color. For cheeses I chose pepper jack because I like a little bit of the spice. I chose a Colby jack and a sharp cheddar. Sharp cheddar happens to be my favorite cheese. So just pick out what you like the best on those. Now on the block of cheese they are eight ounces and this recipe only calls for six so I will usually just cut up these into four and then you already know you've got the two ounces that you can set aside and use for something else and then I'll just chop these for the salad. Now that everything's chopped and the noodles have cooled down we're going to assemble our bowl and I'm going to show you a trick that I use with the salad dressing after we get everything put together. So let's get our noodles in here. They're so cute and tiny. You know just a little bitty spiral here but I'll tell you what one serving has 32 grams of fiber so you're going to want to make sure that you are taking in enough water while you're eating hero pasta just to ensure that your belly stays happy. All right so now we're going to follow that up with our cut up pepperonis and then we have our diced bell pepper and then we have some pepper cheese or I'm sorry I used the banana peppers. We have banana peppers and then each of our cheeses. So I have the Colby jack. Put it to a little one quarter inch half inch squares just you know bite size and then we've got the white cheddar and the pepper jack. I might have should have got a bigger bowl. It's been a minute since I've made it. All right and then of course I've chopped up the broccoli and the cauliflower so we'll get that in here as well. Yeah I probably should have had a bigger bowl. You might have to swap that out so we can give this a stir. Sorry about that. There we go. All right for the salad dressing. I learned this years ago and basically what you're going to do is squeeze off this extra oil that's sitting at the top. So you have the line right here where all of the seasoning is and down so you want to keep all of that but you want to get rid of all of this oil up here. All it's going to do is just make your pasta salad oily and the flavor is all down here so you don't really need any of this. It's just extra calories. Now I will tell you that the way I do this is kind of messy. So I have the bowl here. I don't want to pour it out because then you might lose some of this goodness down here. So I just squeeze. I didn't mean for it to do that. You just squeeze it until it all comes out here and you got that seasoning right at the top of the rim and you know you're good. Now I will keep this oil in the bowl while I'm stirring up the pasta salad just to ensure that I do have indeed enough liquid and then sometimes what I will do is buy a second jar of this because as it sits in the refrigerator and starts soaking in it can get a little bit dry. I'll just add some each day to ensure that it doesn't get too dry and then we're just going to put this over the salad just like that. All right let me wash my hands. Okay now we want to add in a half a cup of parmesan cheese. I was the person at Olive Garden that the waiter would break his arm trying to wind out all the cheese the grated cheese because I never would tell him to stop. So do to taste. If you like more parmesan cheese add more parmesan cheese and then we've got this salad seasoning and I'm going to do two tablespoons of that and again this is to taste also so sometimes I will add more as I stir it up and taste it just to make sure that it comes out okay. We're going to give this a good stir now. Oh look at all of those beautiful colors. I will start by saying that I am highly impressed with how well these hero noodles held up to this process. A lot of times if you notice the low carb noodles they tend to break up and break down and break apart and they just don't hold up very well so I'm already I am very impressed. Before I give this a taste I do want to let you know that I load all of my recipes in MyFitnessPal so if you use that to log your macros it'll be there for you under she prepped smart high protein summer salad summer pasta salad. I will also drop this printable down in the comments so that you can have a copy of the recipe and I'll put a QR code right here for my TV viewers that way you can scan it and get to the printable version later. It also has a macro breakdown on it as well so you'll get all of that information in the comments section. All right we're going to give it a taste and see how it turned out. I get a little bit of cheese and some noodle and some pepper pepperoni. I've missed that. Oh my goodness this is good. Okay so that pasta you cannot even tell is a low carb pasta. It's got a very nice bite to it. The salad seasoning is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's giving it that whole pasta salad vibe. Parmesan cheese gives it that nice bite. Of course I'm a huge cheese fan so that happened to be the cheddar which was my favorite so I actually really enjoyed that bite. I can even taste some of the banana pepper um sweetie tanginess. I am so excited to have pasta salad back in my life again. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. So as far as storage this will stay in the refrigerator for five days in an airtight container. It actually tastes better the second day after all of the flavors have had a chance to mingle and meld and get all of that yumminess on the noodles. Second day is the best day. That's the high protein summer pasta salad. 21 grams of protein, 6 grams of net carbs and this baby's back in the potluck rotation. Pretty excited about that. So if you have a potluck to go to and you also need to take a sweet or a snack or a treat I'm going to drop you in a playlist right here for those. If you find something that you like I hope you consider subscribing to my channel. Thank you for watching my video.