In an extremely scientific experiment with one Italian-Canadian judge on a live television show, my goal was to see once and for all if gluten free pasta is as good as regular wheat pasta.
The Taste Test
I made two versions of three kinds of pasta: the three bowls in front are with a simple olive oil and garlic sauce and in the three bowls in back are doused in an organic tomato sauce.
The Pasta
On the left is the 100% rice pasta from Rizopia. In the middle was the regular wheat pasta from Delverde. And on the right is the Super Grains Pasta from GoGo Quinoa.
But host Laura Casella didn’t know that!
The Results
She tasted the rice pasta with olive oil first and liked it a lot. She then tried the wheat pasta and said she preferred the texture of the first pasta (the rice pasta). Then she tried the Super Grains quinoa pasta, which is brown and white, and definitely doesn’t look like regular pasta, and said her favourite was the first pasta – Rizopia! Boy, was she shocked when I told her.
Caveats
It’s possible that the wheat pasta was slightly less cooked than the rice pasta. Laura also said she didn’t like the yellow colour of the wheat pasta, but wheat pasta should be yellow because it’s traditionally made with egg yolks. Many of us are just used to seeing whiter pasta, possibly because a lot of pasta uses lower quality wheat than durum wheat, which has a golden colour from a yellow endosperm. And finally, if Laura had tried the pastas only in the tomato sauce, she might not have seen the brownish colour of the quinoa pasta and she might have liked it more.
Health
I just wanted to note that from a health standpoint, the rice pasta is maybe not the best choice. It’s made from 100% organic rice and contained 2 g of fibre and 4 g of protein, versus the quinoa pasta, which had 8 g of protein and 6 g of fibre, and the wheat pasta, which had also had 8 g of protein, but only 1 g of fibre. Some wheat pasta has higher protein and fibre than that, but you need to check the labels. Of course there are other nutritional comparisons to make; these just seemed the most obvious.
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