No idea if this is in the right area, but it’s the closest I can figure. I’m a huge pasta fan, and one of the things I had to do early on was to find a pasta substitute (and make a great meaty spaghetti sauce to eat with it.) I have now tried both Shirataki Noodles and Palmini Noodles, and wanted to share my thoughts on them, and see how they match up with anyone else’s.
Started with Shirataki Noodles, and have tried them twice, following the full prep instructions for best results (rinse well, boil, dry fry). Going through the full process took slightly longer, but I had no problem with the bad taste some people have complained about. They have virtually no flavor, but the consistency is quite similar to angelhair pasta, and they’ve worked pretty well for me. the noodles are -very- long and stringy, and might be best cut up a bit, rather than wrapping a single 2 foot long noodle onto my fork. I also had a slight problem with noodles trying to slither down my throat before I was ready for them to, and therefore slight worries of gagging or choking. Smaller bites seems to help. But they worked quite well as a method to reasonably get my great meat sauce into my belly.
Today I tried a can of the Palmini Linguini. I followed most of the instructions for cooking, but left out the soaking in milk for a half-hour or hour, because I’d seen some comments saying it wasn’t needed. Rinsed well, and then boiled for about five minutes, and again found nothing of the rumored possible bad taste. Much like the Shiritaki Noodles, they had almost no flavor whatsoever, which was fine by me. Though the noodles were labeled as linguini, I found them much closer to regular spaghetti in the size of the noodles, and looking at them, they had the appearance of Campbell’s noodles in their chicken noodle soup. This was very misleading. The problem for me with these noodles was two-fold. They were literally crispy, which seems entirely the wrong texture for spaghetti for me, and a LOT of work to chew. There was no problem with sneaking down my throat, instead they quickly broke down into kind of like a cud, which I had to chew on for a couple of minutes per bite before I broke it down enough to swallow.
Both are low carb (3 or 4 carbs per serving) and low calorie (something like 10 calories for the Shirataki, vs 20 calories for the Palmini), and I don’t really know of any other nutritional information on them. For me, the texture of the Palmini (even after boiling for five minutes) was the deciding factor, and I’ll be sticking with the Shirataki noodles. That, or just sticking some of my meat sauce on a plate, adding a little cheese, and just eating it straight … you know, that could work well, too!
Anybody else have any thoughts and experience with these options? Sometime I’ll probably make and try the cheese and egg noodles, but they are most certainly -not- low calorie.