Pesto Caprese Pasta Salad with Mozzarella Balls
Full of fresh flavour, this Pesto Caprese Pasta Salad will be a winning side dish at potlucks or barbecues. This nutritious and easy-to-make salad contains juicy cherry tomatoes, mini mozzarella balls, red onion, fresh basil, pesto, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. It’s great for meal prep, too!
Caprese Salad Meets Pesto and Pasta
If you’re a caprese salad lover (who doesn’t love a salad that’s like 50% cheese?), you will LOVE this pesto caprese pasta salad recipe. It’s one of my many healthy salad recipes, and is super quick and easy to make (and extra-delicious if you use my extra easy homemade basil pesto).
Inspired by the tomato-cheese-basil combination of caprese, this cold pasta salad is made with fresh and juicy tomatoes, crisp red onion, squishy delicious mozzarella balls, and BOTH both balsamic vinegar AND basil pesto for a delicious punch of flavours. What’s not to love?
Choose Your Pasta Player:
For this tomato mozzarella pasta salad, you can also choose between traditional pasta, whole grain pasta, or even a legume-based pasta like chickpea pasta if you want to increase the protein content of the salad. You can use a short pasta variety that you like, such as rotini, fusilli, rigatoni, or bowties. I used rotini pasta in mine and it was perfect.
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Pesto Caprese Pasta Salad with Mozzarella Balls
Ingredients
- 1 375g package pasta
- 2 cups cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
- 1/2 large red onion, thinly sliced
- 1 200g container mini mozzarella (bocconcini) balls, drained of liquid
- 1 package basil leaves, chopped
- 2 heaping tbsp basil pesto
- 1-2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
- black pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Cook pasta according to package directions and let cool.
- Add cooked pasta, tomatoes, red onion, mozzarella and basil to a large mixing bowl.
- Toss mixing bowl ingredients together with basil pesto.
- Drizzle with balsamic vinegar and sprinkle with black pepper before serving. Enjoy!
This what my son made for supper tonight. I do not know off the record he used was from your recipe because his wife left out for him with instructions. It was very good and I would masks out again. He did not use red onion, and there was a basil pesto “dressing” that was added to the pasta and other ingredients in the recipe he made. I would like to try this one and see what the difference might be in taste.
I was wondering though why as a registered dietician you would not have provided the nutrition content per serving – calories is what I usually try to guide my eating by.
Have you figured out the nutrition of this recipe? I am just wondering why you did not? My daughter in law on California is a registered dietician and mostly includes that when sharing a recipe.
It is much appreciated by many today to know overall that count.
Thank you
Hi Carine, thanks for your comment. In the past I didn’t include the calorie/nutrition info for my recipes as my approach to healthy eating encourages individuals to focus less on numbers and more on adding nutritious foods to their diet. I have since started to include it for some recipes at the request of my readers but have not yet calculated the nutritional values for this recipe. I’ll add it to my list of recipes to update!