This Creamy Ingredient Gives Pasta Salad A Serious Flavor Boost

Pasta salads are a common sight at potlucks and parties for good reason: They're easy to make, filling, and can pack a lot of variety in a single bowl. They can also, however, get a little boring. Call it a consequence of their being so easy to make — we tend to go on autopilot with our recipes, making the same one over and over again because that's what comfort foods are all about. If you feel like shaking things up now and then, you can turn to a variety of extra ingredients to upgrade your pasta salad, including an unexpected household staple.

Most home cooks might not think that peanut butter belongs in a pasta salad, but the creamy spread adds loads of complexity and nuance to the right recipes. Mixing it in with lime, soy sauce, and sriracha gives you a tantalizing Thai-inspired dressing that goes great with veggies and pasta. This recipe for peanut soba noodle salad contrasts the peanut butter's rich flavors with the freshness of cucumbers and the brightness of ginger for a delightfully layered dish. A splash of toasted sesame oil amps up the nuttiness of the butter to give your pasta salad even more oomph.

Peanut butter has long been the secret ingredient in recipes because of how its flavors can balance out other ingredients, like the spices in chili. Pasta salads, because of their diverse ingredients, just so happen to be the perfect playground for that sort of thing.

If you're going to try adding peanut butter to your next pasta salad, it might be best to go with one that has as few ingredients as possible. It's always easier to adjust the flavor by adding salt or sugar to the mix rather than trying to work around the spread's existing sweetness. This also gives you more flexibility to explore different flavor profiles in your dressing, since you'll be able to use things like honey to give your pasta salad more of a floral sweetness rather than a sugary one.

A store-bought option worth considering is Crazy Richard's 100% Peanuts! Creamy Peanut Butter, which, as the name implies, contains nothing but peanuts. It was good enough to place second overall in Mashed's ranking of 14 peanut butter brands, topping established names like Smucker's and Jif. It might be a little on the pricier side at $3.99 for a 6-ounce jar, but if you're using it more as a cooking ingredient than for PB&Js, it'll last a while.

You could also skip the store-bought route and make peanut butter at home. Not only will you have full control over the flavor and amount, but you can also match the consistency of your peanut butter to whatever works best for the recipe you're using. It beats having to keep a jar each of smooth and crunchy peanut butter if you like variety in your pasta salads.