This simple and easy pesto pasta salad recipe combines orzo pasta with basil pesto, feta cheese, onions, olives, artichokes, and tomatoes for a cool summer side dish that’s perfect for your next BBQ.
We love basil pesto at our house. It’s a great way to add a ton of flavor to all sorts of things – soups, pasta, bruschetta, and it’s a great marinade for fish, pork, and chicken. Stirring a little into the alfredo sauce might be our favorite way to use it.
And while we’ve made a lot of homemade pesto, we also like to grab those little containers of refrigerated pesto from the grocery store. The non-perishable stuff is good too, but the chilled version just feels a lot fresher.
This pesto pasta salad takes advantage of one of those containers of chilled fresh basil pesto by combining it with fresh lemon, orzo pasta, black olives, red onion, tomato, artichoke hearts, and feta cheese for a fresh, light, and cool result achieve a side dish that’s perfect for summer—or any time of year, by the way.
As I mentioned before, I highly recommend choosing the refrigerated pesto over the preserved stuff. The chilled version has a fresher flavor and a much brighter green color – which looks great in this dish.
I also recommend buying a block of feta cheese and crumble it yourself. The feta that you buy already crumbled seems to have a lot less flavor.
As with all salads like this, which you can make a little ahead of time and keep in the fridge, I always recommend tasting it and adding extra salt and pepper before serving. This time in the fridge can change and develop flavors, and often the salad needs a little more seasoning before serving.
If you want a little something different, there are a variety of swaps you could do. You could swap Kalamata olives for the black olives, mozzarella pearls or mozzarella cubes for the feta, another pasta for the orzo, the list goes on. It’s very easy to customize. You can even add some grilled chicken and turn this delicious side into a light meal.
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