AI photoPasta Salad with Chicken and Curry Dressing
A creamy curry-dressed pasta salad with chicken, bacon, broccoli and peas.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
- 400 g Pasta
- 1 pcs Broccoli broken into small florets
- 100 g Peas frozen
- 75 g Bacon sliced
- 400 g Chicken breast diced
- 25 g Plain flour
- 1 tsp Paprika
- 80 g Spinach
- 4 pcs Spring onion sliced into rings
- 1 tbsp Olive oil for frying
- Salt
- Black pepper freshly ground
- 250 ml Crème fraîche 18%
- 4 tbsp Mayonnaise
- 1 tbsp Curry powder medium heat
- 2 tsp Dijon mustard
- 30 g Pickled gherkins finely chopped
- 2 tsp Sugar
- 0.5 pcs Lemon finely grated zest and a little juice
Steps
Mix all the ingredients for the curry dressing and season to taste with salt, pepper, lemon zest, mustard, sugar and extra curry powder if you like. Let the dressing sit a little so the flavours can develop.
3 minCook the pasta according to the packet instructions.
10 minWhen the pasta has less than 1 minute left to cook, add the broccoli florets and frozen peas to the pot and cook together for 1 minute.
1 minDrain and let the pasta, broccoli and peas cool completely.
5 minFry the bacon until crisp in a hot pan with a little oil, then place it on kitchen paper to drain.
3 minToss the chicken pieces in plain flour, paprika, salt and pepper and fry them in the same pan used for the bacon, adding a little more oil if needed; cook, stirring, until the chicken is golden and cooked through.
7 minMix the cooled pasta, broccoli, peas, chicken and finely chopped bacon with the curry dressing in a large bowl.
3 minAdd the spinach and spring onion just before serving and mix well.
1 min
This is a cold, creamy pasta salad built around one idea: curry mayonnaise doing the job that vinaigrette does in a French salad, except richer and with more going on underneath it. It's a British "coronation" instinct — curry powder stirred into something dairy, born out of empire-era kitchens making do with a tin of curry powder rather than a trip to a spice market — and it works precisely because mayonnaise and crème fraîche have enough fat to carry the spice without it tasting raw or harsh.
What decides whether this actually works is temperature discipline, which sounds grand for a pasta salad but isn't. The pasta, broccoli and peas have to go in cold. Dressing mixed into warm pasta doesn't coat it — it gets absorbed, the oil and dairy split slightly from the heat, and what you get in the fridge the next day is a salad sitting in a thin puddle rather than pasta wearing a dressing. So cooling fully — properly, bowl spread out, not a hot colander lid clamped on top — isn't a fussy extra step, it's what stops the dish from separating.
The pasta itself is mostly a vehicle — short shapes with ridges or hollows (fusilli, penne, conchiglie) hold the dressing in their grooves; a smooth long pasta like spaghetti would just slide off it, so if you're substituting, think "surface for the sauce to grip," not "pasta I have in the cupboard."
Broccoli and peas cooked together in the pasta water in the last minute is an economy of pots, not a flavour trick — one pan, one timing window, less washing up. The giveaway for doneness here isn't a clock, it's colour and give: broccoli should still be the deep, slightly dull green of raw broccoli brightened, not the washed-out khaki it turns at two minutes over — bend a floret, it should flex and snap cleanly rather than go mushy between your fingers. Peas need almost nothing; they're already cooked from freezing, you're only warming them through.
Bacon fried first and the fat left in the pan is the same logic a Sunday roast follows with its dripping — fat already carrying flavour is better than fat starting from nothing, so the chicken fries in bacon fat, picking up a smokiness you couldn't add back in afterwards. If you're using a regular domestic hob with one wide pan, work in batches rather than crowding it: a crowded pan drops in temperature, the chicken steams instead of browning, and you lose the crust you floured it for in the first place.
Crème fraîche at 18% is doing a specific job: it's acidic enough to sit well against curry spice and rich enough not to split under dressing-sitting-in-fridge conditions the way single cream would. No crème fraîche — soured cream is the nearest cousin, same tang, slightly thinner, so go a little lighter on the lemon juice to compensate. Mayonnaise alongside it, rather than instead of it, brings the emulsified fat that makes the dressing cling to pasta rather than pool at the bottom of the bowl — this is not a case where you can simply double the crème fraîche and skip the mayonnaise; you'd lose the body.
Curry powder — medium — is standing in for a whole spice blend most people in a British kitchen won't keep seven jars for; that's the actual history here, curry powder exists as a British colonial shorthand for a cuisine's complexity, compressed into one tin for convenience. Letting the dressing rest those few minutes before using it is real, not decorative: ground spice needs a little time and a little fat to bloom its flavour out rather than tasting dusty and separate from the cream around it. Gherkins, mustard, sugar and lemon are the sharp counterweight to all that fat and curry sweetness — drop any one of them and the dressing tastes flat rather than rounded; if you've no gherkins, a few capers finely chopped do the same acidic, briny cutting job.
Patience is the one ingredient not listed with a weight. Rushing the cooling of the pasta, or skipping the dressing's resting time, won't ruin the dish outright — but it's the difference between a salad that tastes assembled and one that tastes like it's had a minute to become itself. This feeds four as a main, generously, or six alongside something else off a Sunday table.