Shrimp Pesto Pasta Salad Recipe with Creamy Dressing (2024)

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Shrimp Pesto Pasta Salad with Creamy Pesto Dressing is a delicious gourmet side dish for holiday menus and potlucks, but it’s also a fantastic full-sized dinner option with cheese tortellini and fresh bites of sautéed shrimp.

You will LOVE this pasta salad, and after one bite, it will be sure to be a favorite!

This week, on my cooking with my neighbors Tuesday recipe day, we really dove into shrimp. Honestly, shrimp is so underrated. It’s delicious; it’s majorly quick at only about 6 minutes to sauté, and it’s diverse.

You can eat shrimp from a grill, oven bake it, pop it in a skillet- heck, even the Japanese places near me cook up a little bit of shrimp. After some our the delicious recipes we created, we started to feel a bit like Bubba Gump in Shrimp.

But I have to share one more; I just have to. This shrimp pesto pasta salad is THE creamiest, most delicious, and gourmet side dish out there.

With decadent bites of cheese tortellini, a spattering of fresh vegetables, sautéed shrimp, and of course, the creamiest pesto dressing ever, this is a rich homemade side dish that will leave no bowl un-turned.

Reasons to Love Shrimp Pesto Pasta Salad

Tortellini – Who doesn’t love robust tortellini? They come in various flavors, filled with mushrooms, chicken, cheese, and so much more. In this case, we used four cheese tortellini as the base of our pesto pasta salad.

Seafood – there really isn’t enough seafood at family and party gatherings. People think seafood is difficult to make, but it’s really not, and this shrimp pesto pasta salad is a great way to sneak a high-class ingredient into a birthday party, potluck, or picnic.

It’s also much easier to cook up than baking chicken for 30 minutes and cools down quickly for cold salads.

Alterations- This pasta salad recipe is so easy to alter! The pesto and tortellini are pretty basic flavors that pair well with added ingredients like additional garlic; the shrimp can be substituted for other seafood like crab or salmon pieces.

Vegetable Salad Options – In this tortellini pesto pasta, you could add almost any kind of small cut-up vegetables.

You could add broccoli florets, black olives, green peppers, or bits of cauliflower.

Shrimp Pesto Pasta Salad Ingredients

For the base of your salad, you need just a few things, veggies and pasta.

• Veggies – red bell peppers, shredded carrots, green olives, frozen peas, shredded Parmesan (I like the FRESH shredded, not the KRAFT powder for this)
• Tortellini – used Cheese version. Since this recipe includes shrimp, you don’t want to mix up flavors too much with other proteins. You can usually find the tortellini in the FRIDGE area near the cheese. It’s a fresh pasta that stays cold.

Creamy Pesto Dressing Ingredients

Hint: Make your pesto dressing in a separate bowl so you can make sure you incorporate and mix your dressing perfectly before adding it to your pasta salad bowl.

• Mayo – I only use Hellmann’s
• Pesto – It is OK to purchase pesto in a jar; it’s typically by the Italian products in your store, but if you want to make some homemade pesto sauce, I have a recipe.
• Heavy whipping Cream – You can substitute half and half or milk if needed, but it might be less thick. Just lower the amount you use to find the right consistency. It won’t alter the flavor too much, although I always recommend using heavy whipping cream for that rich, hearty flavor.
• Olive Oil
• White Vinegar
• Seasonings

More Delicious Shrimp Recipes

If you love shrimp and want to incorporate it more in recipes like I am, make sure you try some of my other creative options:

• Seafood Pasta Salad – This seafood pasta salad is made with shells and a mayonnaise base. While some ingredients are similar to this recipe, it tastes nothing like it.
• Mediterranean Shrimp Salad – Tomatoes, Avocados, and Shrimp, oh my! This is a super fresh salad with a simple non-mayo base.
• Tuna Pasta Salad – Corkscrew pasta, tuna, and tomatoes make up this traditional side dish salad, perfect for picnics
• Tri Color Pasta Salad – This salad doesn’t have shrimp in it, although when we made it, we had INTENDED on adding it. We simply ran out of shrimp before we got to this recipe, but it would be an amazing addition.