Make this Caprese Pasta Salad for a delicious vegetarian pasta salad recipe. Everyone will love this easy pasta salad inspired by Caprese Salad, but instead basil tomato mozzarella pasta!
Caprese Salad is a big favorite in our house and we make it almost daily when we have fresh ripe tomatoes from the garden. It’s easy to make and you can even make a beautiful platter of caprese salad for entertaining, but what if you want to stretch it out to serve more? Make our recipe for caprese pasta salad! It’s all the flavors of a classic caprese salad, but bulked up with some pasta.
how to make caprese pasta salad
You can choose any style of pasta for the caprese pasta salad recipe, but we like to go with gluten free or whole wheat rotini. More often than not we’ll make it gluten free so that all of our guests can enjoy.
We’ve found that a brown rice gluten free pasta is the best, not too gummy, just right. Making a gluten free pasta salad is a great way to make a gluten friendly recipe without spending too much money or too much time prepping. This pasta salad takes about 15 minutes to make and that is mostly the cook time for the pasta.
While the pasta is cooking you can prep all of the caprese pasta salad ingredients.
Make a double batch and leave the mozzarella out of half of this caprese pasta recipe for your vegan guests too. It’s super flavorful pasta salad recipe and your vegan guests will love it without the mozzarella just as much as you enjoy it with it.
Also, if you want to make this caprese pasta salad with balsamic vinegarette you can, but we prefer to serve it this way and give our guests the option of adding balsamic vinaigrette.
Speaking of on the side, we make enough dressing to coat the pasta, but we also make extra so that our guests can add more if they’d like. Keep in mind the tomatoes add a little liquid as well.
Some like extra olive oil, whereas some like it drier.
This caprese pasta salad recipe will serve 6, but you can easily increase amounts to serve more guests.
PIN our Caprese Pasta Salad to save for later
Caprese Pasta Salad
(click stars to vote)
Print Pin SaveIngredients
- 3 cups whole wheat rotini pasta , cooked
- 1 cup cherry tomatoes
- 1 cup ciliegine mozzarella
- 6 leaves basil
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 3/4 teaspoon dried basil
- 1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper fresh cracked
- pinch of salt
Instructions
- Place the whole wheat pasta in a large serving dish.
- Slice up the tomatoes and add to the serving dish along with the ciliegine mozzarella.
- Chiffonade the basil and add to the dish.
- In a small bowl mix together the olive oil, basil, parsley, black pepper, and salt.
- Pour the caprese salad dressing over the ingredients and mix until combined.
- Serve or refrigerate until ready to serve.
Tried this recipe?
We’d love to know what you think! Please leave a rating and comment to share your thoughts on this recipe. Your feedback helps us continue sharing free, high-quality recipes with you. Thank you so much!
Nutrition
The nutritional information is automatically calculated and can vary based ingredients and products used. If the nutrition numbers are important for you we recommend calculating them yourself.
Looks so good!!!
It would be helpful if you had the caprese salad dressing in the ingredients space. It only mentions it when you go down to almost the last step of the directions.
Thanks for your feedback! The dressing isn’t a separate element and there will not be leftovers or a portion used, it’s part of the overall recipe, which is why it’s included with the other ingredients. I did a quick google search and this is the standard format for most Caprese Pasta Salad recipes. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and will keep it in mind for future recipes! 🙂