Taste test: Pasta salad

So what am I eating? I need to know because hidden away in my New Year’s Resolutions there’s a micro-dot in sanskrit reading “eat more salad�.

That’s fine if we’re saying salad is cold pasta with a token element of fruity freshness in a fattening sauce.
If that’s the case, I can do pasta salad.

Anyone can do pasta salad… it’s just, well there’s a nagging voice in my head (most probably a salad purist shouting at the top of his enfeebled lungs) that tells me that my pasta salad delusion is a spoonful of sugar (literally) to help the medicine go down.

The salad purists would argue that salad contains an unmolested rainbow of many colours plucked from branch and stem and soil.

They would brandish a sharpened pepper slice in my face and insist that dressing is the one concession to taste, and misery is the very soul of healthy eating.

They would then collapse from over-exertion and I would laugh in their wan and pinched faces.
I would then slam home my advantage by telling them that salad is a mixture of cold foods, including vegetables and/or fruits and sometimes with the addition of meat, fish, pasta, cheese, or whole grains.

So says Wikipedia so it must true.

Chargrilled Chicken &
Bacon Pasta
Tesco, £1.20
Ingredients: creamy tomato and herb pasta chargrilled chicken, reduced fat mayonnaise, yoghurt and herb dressing, sweetcure smoke flavoured bacon
Calories: 420
Sugar: 2.2g
Fat: 23.5g
Saturates: 3.1g
Salt: 0.9g

The most visually weak of the trio – although none of them is an painting – this Tesco offering had all the hallmarks of a dish destined for the file market “Disappointment�.

(I have such a file and it bulges with all manner of things from candy floss to low salt baked beans.)

The chicken looked ropey, the bacon was apparently doled out in a serving size called “speck� and overall the thing reeked of blandness and splodge and left-overs. However, from such humble beginnings, it excelled itself.

Solid, flavourful and hearty, this was the surprise package – the one that delivered the goods – and, alone among the threesome, came with a fold-up fork that would have Ray Mears in raptures.
4/5

Pasta With Honey & Mustard British Chicken
Marks and Spencer, £2.10
600g / 300g = 225 calories
Ingredients: Cooked free range egg pasta, honey & wholegrain mustard mayonnaise dressing, cooked honey & mustard marinated chicken breast, sweetcorn, red peppers, sunflower oil
Calories: 350g
Sugar: 3.4g
Fat: 12.4g
Saturates 2.0g
Salt: 1.15g

I had high hopes for the Marks & Spencer offering – as one does with such an excellent purveyor of the quick and aesthetically pleasing foodstuff.

And, yes, it was the lightest and freshest of the trio with pasta made of helium offcuts and a sauce that was as self-effacing as a Jane Austen heroine.

But the thing never hung together for me. It wimped out. Mustard is the devil’s own accompaniment, the last refuge of the orally challenged, and the other ingredients, piquant and intriguing as they were, never overcame this dastardly oppressor with anything like the Blitz spirit required.
2/5

Chicken & Pasta Salad
Waitrose, £2.60
Ingredients: Al torchio pasta, tomato and basil chicken, free range egg mayonnaise, tomato ketchup, sweet red chili sauce
Calories: 551
Sugar: 6.2g
Fat: 31.2g
Saturates: 4.4g
Salt: 1.4g

A-ha. We arrived at last at the summit. Waitrose, so often the bridesmaid to M&S’s bride, in this instance stole the bouquet and scarpered.

By far the most flavourful of the three with basil leaping from the plastic tray and assailing the nostrils and tastebuds.

The greenery assuaged my guilt over forlorn diet plans and the chicken was spicey and wholesome and coloured in a way that signalled its intent to be more interesting, tasty and satisfying than its rivals upon other shelves.

Ugly, of course, unless you like Jackson Pollock.
4/5