On yesterday’s grocery run, I waltzed past a box of chickpea-based pasta. If anyone’s tried pasta made from chickpeas, I would love to hear your thoughts. Worth a try?
Pasta is such a handy base for a quick weeknight dinner, but my husband would rather not eat it for awhile because of dialing back on wheat-y and bread-y foods to help jumpstart weight loss. I’m wondering if the chickpea-based stuff would substitute well.
I have tried a few of these and they get solid remarks from my family. It is a good alternative for us since my daughter will eat pasta all day every day if given the chance. My advice is be sure to have a sauce that can stand up to it. Something hearty, not a butter/oil sauce. I’ve found you need more sauce/liquid than you normally do with other pastas. It feels like it sucks it up a bit. Also, for the love of god, DO NOT OVER COOK IT. Talk about disaster. It goes from a nice al dente to pure mush quickly.
Thank you for your good advice. It sounds like chickpea pasta may be even more prone to overcooking than whole wheat pasta is, and I’m familiar with that. Ditto on the need for a heartier sauce.
I believe I’ll give it a try, with the help of your pointers.
Depends a lot on the brand. I can taste the chickpea flavor, so I just skip pasta when I’m going low-carb than use chickpea or red lentil or black bean pastas.
But I’d agree on heartier sauces - tomato based ones mask the flavor best.
Have you tried soba noodles? The putty color is fine in a stirfry that has colorful ingredients, but rather offputting in tomato sauce dishes. Nonetheless, I like the flavor. It is my understanding that only very expensive soba noodles are all buckwheat. If memory serves, most also contain wheat. But as the packages I see bear little or no info in English, I can’t say what the percentages are.
Whenever spaghetti squash is on sale, or included in my Misfits Market boxes, I steam or roast them whole, and eviscerate them after they cool. I AM happy with this as a spaghetti substitute.
Good point. I think that Banza may be the brand of chickpea pasta on promo at my grocer, FWIW. (Market Basket for those in the Greater Boston area).
Thanks for your know-how! A look at the inexpensive soba noodles in my cabinet matches your understanding. Ingredients are wheat flour, buckwheat flour, and yam flour. I don’t use soba a lot though. To me the flavor is distinctive, so soba is less of the blank canvas I’m looking for.
I too like subbing in spaghetti squash for conventional pasta noodles. When I get a spaghetti squash, I poke a few holes in it with a metal barbecue skewer, put an inch or so of water in the bottom of my slow cooker, and steam for a few hours. For more even cooking, I flip the squash over once as the bottom softens. I get better yield out of a squash that way than when I roast, because all the flesh separates into noodle-like strands for me.
In the summer it’s easier here because we often have a lot of zucchini to spiralize into noodles. Pretty quick and plays that blank canvas role I’m hoping to fill.
Finally tried the Banza chickpea pasta I bought, with arugula and hazelnuts. Verdict: I plan to try the Banza again sometime to see if I want to put it in the weeknight rotation. Picture of plate before Parmesan cheese, which was important to help the flavors meld.
We enjoyed our dinner, though I’m not completely sold. I can’t do my one-pot weeknight dinner with this because the chickpea pasta needs lots of cooking water because it’s sticky. Normally I cheat by using my sauté pan and low water, then assemble the sauce in that same pan while the pasta drains.
The chickpea-based product is also fussier to work with than the traditional stuff. Thank you, @gracieggg for the advice to be vigilant about not overcooking. Al dente to mush—oh, that would have happened fast.
I also found that the pasta immediately stuck to the pan as I sauced it, and I needed to add extra cooking water to counteract the sticking.
The higher protein and the lower carb properties of the Banza are attractive for our purposes, so I’ll give it another try to see if this type of pasta grows on me.
