Vegan Pesto Pasta Salad

Try this easy pasta salad with shitake mushrooms, tofu, juicy cherry tomatoes, zesty olives and creamy avocado tossed together in an unique curry leaf pesto dressing. You won’t regret it.

Forget plain pasta salads with basic dressings and try this spruced up pesto pasta salad with a mix of raw and cooked vegetables dressed in a herby, zesty pesto sauce. We’ve also added in a secret ingredient to make it more nutritious!

I love using fusilli for pasta salads as they are able to soak up the flavour of the dressing really well. For the toppings, I went with store-bought tofu for my protein – you can try my 5-minute Vegan Feta Cheese here as well. Or keeping it plain still does the trick as you’ll be eventually coating it with the pesto sauce.

I find that shitake mushrooms also bring a lovely umami flavour and depth to the salad so I added some
sautéed shitake mushrooms to the salad. For the raw vegetables, I went with juicy cherry tomatoes, green olives and creamy avocado. They worked so well for the salad.

For the dressing, the ingredients are very similar to my regular vegan pesto – basil leaves, pine nuts, nutritional yeast, lemon juice and garlic powder. This time round I also added toasted curry leaves. I drew inspiration from my mum’s signature green chutney (indian dip) that she makes for us to eat with rice for healthy skin and hair. Curry leaves are super aromatic when toasted and it blends right in with the taste of pesto!