Crab pasta salad

Boil a pot of water, lightly salted, over a high heat. Once boiling, add the dried pasta and cook until tender, around 9 minutes. Then drain and leave to cool.

Combine the sour cream, mayonnaise, lemon juice, honey mustard, and fresh dill in a mixing bowl until creamy. Season with salt and black pepper to taste.

Add the cooled pasta to the sour cream mixture, and then stir in the cooked crabmeat, diced pepper, and celery. Mix together until well combined, then cover and transfer to the fridge to cool for a minimum of 1 hour before serving.

Tips & tricks

For the best crab pasta salad, we’d recommend sourcing freshly cooked crab meat for your dish, but you can use imitation crab meat as a replacement if that’s easier to find in your local grocery store.

When choosing your pasta, you really need to pick a variety that’s going to stick to the sauce well and create a lovely, creamy, cohesive dish. In our recipe above we’ve suggested using pasta shells, but you could create a crab macaroni salad, which will stick to the sauce just as well. Other varieties like penne or rigatoni will also work, and some chefs will opt to create their pasta salads with a combination of pasta shapes. If you don’t want to wait around for your pasta to cool down during the cooking process, you can actually cook the pasta ahead of time and keep it in the fridge for a day or two before you decide to assemble the pasta salad together.

You can make this dish with lighter versions of the sour cream and mayonnaise. Both these lighter varieties work brilliantly as a slightly healthier alternative to the full-fat options for the pasta sauce.

Storage

Crab pasta salad can be kept in the fridge for up to three days, in an airtight container. It’s not a dish that freezes well, as it’ll tend to become quite mushy when you defrost it. This one’s best enjoyed fresh on the day of making.

Recipe variations

Instead of crab meat pasta salad, it’s easy enough to swap in another seafood favorite, like lobster. Lobster and crab meat can be used fairly interchangeably, but there are a few differences in taste and texture. Crab is typically sweeter in flavor, but lobster tends to be less flaky.

Whichever meat you choose, the best pasta salads are packed full of vegetables. Whilst we’ve shared a recipe only using pepper and celery above, you can add all sorts of vegetables to this dish, including fresh peas. We’ve suggested using fresh dill, but you can add chives to the recipe to introduce another grassy, herbal flavor. There’s really no end to the twists you can put on pasta salads, and you can make endless different dishes using a basic pasta salad recipe as a base.