How about pasta?

(George) #1

I think there needs to be a separate category for pasta, but we forge ahead anyway. Has anyone done a taste test and review of different pasta ?
I have found the bread that i like so now its on to pasta.
Thanks

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

Pasta was one of my binge foods when I was a carb-burner. And I haven’t really enjoyed any of the vegetable substitutes, since going keto. There is Carl’s recipe for bzoodles, which taste a lot like real pasta, but I’m not set up to make them at home.

(Bob M) #3

I actually just make the sauce and ignore anything similar to pasta. Take some sausage and ground beef, fry up, add Raos with Kalamata olives, anchovies, mushrooms, etc., cook for a while. Oh yeah, Parmesan or other cheese, dusted on before you eat. Eat. You don’t need the pasta.

(Jane) #4

Pasta has very little flavor and it really a delivery vehicle for the meats, cheeses snd sauces. Plus filling.

I use finely shredded cabbage for my “spaghetti” and it is surprisingly good. Walmart carries it in the produce department and it is called Angel Hair shredded cabbage. No carrots like the cole slaw mixes and shredded finer also

I use it with chicken and alfredo sauce too.

#5

When I was eating the copycat pastas I didn’t mind the Shiritaki ones, as long as they were thin like angel hair, didn’t like the thicker ones, always seemed to be chewy. These day I just limit it and use the Dreamfields Pasta, which is a real pasta but they allegedly have some method to reduce the carb damage. The carbs are still listed, but don’t seem to do anything in either me, my wife or my brother. There was some stuff a year or so after they came out claiming that their “process” was BS and did nothing, but I can tell you personally when we eat it we feel fine, have no issues at all. When we eat normal pasta we typically feel like crap, have carb crash and cravings for days after. So they’re doing something to it, what that is I have no idea.

(Bob M) #6

The knock against this was the blood sugar hit. Have you tried taking your blood sugar every 15 minutes after eating? And comparing with real pasta?

(Jane) #7

I tried it years ago when it came out and I was doing Atkins. Then the bad press so I stopped eating it. I didn’t know it was still on the market since I don’t buy past anymore.

Now that I have a glucose and ketone meter it would be an interesting test to do.

(Laurie) #8

Shirataki (konjak) pasta. As mentioned above, angel hair is best. It does need to be dried out before use, either by sauteing or in microwave. Shirataki is discussed at length elsewhere online (and perhaps in this forum), so I won’t go into detail.

To me, it resembles Asian noodle somewhat, but it does the trick when you want something spaghetti-ish.

(Bob M) #9

A confession: I ate pasta every day for at least 20 years. Every day. Sometimes, multiple times per day.

In the last 7 years, I’ve eaten real pasta a handful of times, such as when at a wedding and to test the “Fire in a Bottle” theory. I also initially tried finding fake pastas. I don’t mind spaghetti squash, but zoodles kill me. The Konjak stuff, I found to be too much work.

I then just started making red sauce, as I describe above. That’s really all I need, and I find I don’t miss the “pasta” part of this.

I also don’t eat fake breads, though, and don’t miss it, so I might not be the best example.

(Tracy) #10

I have experimented with several. Anything that has oat fiber tastes like sawdust and earthworms. If I need to make lasagna, I add 4 eggs and 4 oz cream cheese to a blender until it looks like a milkshake. Pour onto a sturdy sheet pan that doesn’t bow in the middle and bake at 350 for about 20 minutes. Use parchment because it will stick. Now you have some flavorless dividers for lasagna. I also beat eggs with whole psyllium husk (1 egg: 1tsp) fry in a nonstick skillet like a crepe then slice up and toss with an oil based sauce like pesto. This can also be used for enchilada “tortillas”.

#11

I thought I had written that first line. :slight_smile:

The “delivery vehicle” description applies to a lot of carb staples – bread, rice, pasta, potatoes. What taste they do have usually comes from the fats and spices we put on them, as well as all the toppings and sauces.

The YouTube channel Serious Keto recently did several videos on resistant starch. He voiced many complaints about eating plain white rice and plain baked potatoes. I thought the best test would be to make a dish that would normally be made with the rice or potatoes, and then test that right away, after cooling, and after cooling and reheating. It needs to be tested in real world situations.

In any case, like you, I sometime use cabbage and make a cabbage Alfredo:

Microwaved Cabbage Alfredo

  • Slice up 3 to 4 cups of cabbage, about the width of fettuccine noodles
  • Add some sliced onions, about the same width slices as the cabbage.
  • Top with butter and spices (smoked paprika, ginger, hot curry powder, …)
  • Microwave until soft, about 5 minutes. It will reduce to about a cup or so.
  • Mix with some Alfredo sauce
  • Top with meats/cheeses (poached eggs on top are the best!)
#12

I want to say I did, but honestly don’t remember. I can definitely do that again, sounds like a reason to eat it this weekend. I’ll post what happens, at least with the dreamfields. Dunno if I want to go down the real stuff road, even eating more carbs these days that stuff destroys me as far as the crash goes.

(Bob M) #13

You could try meat “noodles” instead (another recipe from the brilliant Maria Emmerich):

It’s best if you make it one day, chill it, reheat it. Allows the “noodles” to get set up.

(Tracy) #14

I tried that once with deli chicken and it was pretty decent.

(Tracy) #15

I really like Palmini. It has 6 net carbs per can. It’s just shredded hearts of palm. Because they are short and somewhat stiff, I prefer to make pork chow mein with it.

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#16

We surely all have our own way :slight_smile:

Well, I always loved tasty, eggy pasta. Traditional pasta of this country has eggs as liquid.
And I am an egg lover anyway…
So although I almost never needed a substitution (I just ate some normal low-carb food… as I went low-carb and stopped eating wheat many years before I first went keto), I had one: eggs. And some oily seed or oily seed flour but minimal amount, my “pasta” is mostly eggs. Nowadays I only eat poppy seed pasta, my flour is poppy seed and I put a lot of poppy seed on top on it. Oh and I fry everything, it’s simple so my pasta is fried. Cooking pasta is so troublesome even without making the pasta ourselves (but I make everything myself, I don’t buy overpriced things that aren’t even eggy enough).

I tried shirataki noodles once out of curiosity despite it was obviously it’s not for me: it’s a pricy, tasteless nothing. And indeed. My “pasta” must be tasty and nutritious. It’s different for people who eat pasta with meat. I ate pasta with very low-carb vegetables in my high-carb times. It’s obvious that konjac flour and cabbage can’t work for pasta here… Even my cheesy pasta had to be flavorful and filling, I mean, the pasta part, I was sensitive to that (I never eat cheesy “pasta” nowadays. only poppy seed can tempt me when I am not on carnivore-ish at the moment). And only fatty protein fills me. Eggs are good.

By the way, bread is totally impossible for me without wheat flour. It’s never really good without, I tried for a little while (not very passionately as I already had several breadless years under my belt). But why would I need bread? I don’t. (It’s just nice. Only it has a lots of eggs, of course.)

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #17

The heating and cooling process can indeed increase the percentage of indigestible carbohydrate in potatoes and rice, from something like 1.4% to something like 1.8%. The problem, apparently, is that if you heat it up again to make it palatable, you run the risk of unlinking the glucose molecules again, and then they stop being resistant starch. In the food industry, the term “resistant starch” means cheap processed indigestible starch that is used to replace the fibre removed from the original ingredients.

(Bob M) #18

I guess you could do this, though this seems like a lot of work and uses almond flour (not my fav):

(George) #19

What have you found as a decent pasta replacement .

(Todd Allen) #20

Beef.