Eating gluten-free gets a whole lot tastier with quality Italian gluten-free pastas.
Italian Deli Online shares five useful tips for cooking with the Alce Nero organic gluten-free pastas that they import to South Africa direct from Italy.
The good news for those embarking on a gluten-free diet these days is that the Italians are ahead of the curve. Gluten-free pastas have been readily available in Italy for many years and with pasta as an essential part of the traditional meal, Italian pasta manufacturers have dedicated their expertise to finding the ideal combinations of gluten-free grains, usually rice and corn, to give the right texture, sauce holding surface, and flavour to match regular durum wheat pastas.
Italian Deli Online imports the Alce Nero brand of gluten-free pastas to South Africa. The brand offers spaghetti, penne and fusilli shapes that absorb all the flavour of sauces beautifully and make eating Italian gluten-free simple and enjoyable. Not only that but the rice and corn used to make the Alce Nero gluten-free pastas is grown organically in Italy, ticking all the boxes for the health-conscious Italian foodie.
So if you are cooking for a gluten-free guest or family member and pasta is on the menu, there’s nothing easier. Here are a few simple tips:
- Have two large pots of water boiling and cook the gluten-free pasta completely separately to the regular pasta. Avoid gluten cross-contamination by using a separate wooden spoon for stirring each pot, and separate colanders to drain the pasta.
- You can use the same sauce for both pastas, as long as there is no flour used in the sauce of course, so avoid bechamel. Think tomato-based sauces, cream sauces or meat sauces. Make slightly more sauce than usual. Gluten-free pasta absorbs sauce well and may need a little extra to get just the right ratio of pasta to sauce.
- If you usually use flour to thicken certain sauces, leave that stage out and instead use cornflour, which is naturally gluten-free. This should be added towards the end of cooking and only if the sauce really needs thickening (often a dash of pasta water is all you need to bind a sauce together, see next tip). First mix the cornflour into a ‘slurry’ with water, add to the sauce and bring it back to boiling point while stirring until the sauce thickens.
- If you have got into the convenient habit of using pasta water to emulsify a sauce or thin one down, double check that you only use the pasta water from the gluten-free pasta. You don’t want any gluten from the regular pasta getting into the sauce. If anything, gluten-free pasta releases more starch into the water than regular pasta so it will have the same binding/emulsifying abilities. Reserve another cup of the gluten-free pasta water just in case you need to let down the sauce some more after you’ve drained the pasta.
- Gluten-free pastas are more likely to stick together than regular pastas as they tend to be higher in starch. To avoid clumping make sure you use plenty of water, a large pot 2/3 full for a whole packet of pasta, and stir the pasta once every 30 seconds or so in the first few minutes of cooking. After draining the pasta, toss immediately with the sauce. If it sits steaming in the colander or pot it’s likely to stick together.
Salt the water well. Think ocean saltiness; 10g of salt per litre of water. This applies to regular pasta too of course, but it really makes a difference to bringing out the flavour of gluten-free pasta.
Serve immediately and enjoy. Buon Appetito!
Find Alce Nero gluten-free pasta, as well as gluten-free Italian biscuits and crackers, at Italian Deli Online for convenient online shopping with free delivery for orders over R500.
