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Cucumber Pasta Salad

"This is a refreshing salad with cucumbers, onion, celery and corkscrew or wagon wheel pasta. Use the dressing as a dip, too!"

By allrecipes · From Open Recipes · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pasta and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 298 recipes mention both. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

The recipe

6 servings
Prep10 min
Cook10 min

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Method written by CompKitchen from the ingredient list. Not the original author's method, not kitchen-tested.

  1. Bring a pan of boiling water to a boil. Add the rotelle pasta and cook until tender, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain well and rinse under cold water until cool.

  2. Peel the English cucumbers, quarter them lengthwise, and chop them. Chop the celery and the onion.

  3. In a large bowl, whisk the creamy salad dressing, buttermilk and celery seed until smooth.

  4. Add the cooled pasta, cucumbers, celery and onion to the bowl. Stir until everything is evenly coated with the dressing.

  5. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving so the flavors blend and the salad is well chilled.

By allrecipes. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pasta + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together298 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Celery + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together18,506 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cucumber + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Cucumber + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pasta + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together331 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pasta, cucumber, celery, buttermilk):

  1. Lettucebetter flavor fit
  2. Chivebetter flavor fit
  3. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pasta, cucumber, celery, buttermilk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).