The molecular gastronomy keto spaghetti recipe

[RightNOW]

So for months on youtube there has been a spate of experiments with an enormously popular recipe from the “molecular gastronomy” world. Cooking is always chemistry and chemical reactions, but some are more unusual or impressive or convenient than others. Using an approach normally used to make fruit-juice caviar by high end chefs, there is now a keto spaghetti (pasta-ish) that will blow your mind.

And it’s stupidly easy. And the batter keeps. And the noodles keep. And they both freeze and thaw just fine. And the noodles can be eaten normally, or stir-fried, or baked, or… suffice to say, I consider it one of the more exciting ‘menu expansions’ the field has had for a long time.

(The guys that run this forum have a very cool pasta-ish flat egg noodle recipe as well. But this one is something completely different.)

Into a high speed blender, toss your arbitrary collection of protein, spices (and a couple other things to follow).

I have seen cooked chicken, cooked beef, hard boiled eggs, spinach powder, protein powder, all be used to make this, and quantity varied. Room for flexibility it seems. I used:

3 cups water (good drinking or distilled water)
(that’s the base, then add whatever else)

3.85oz canned chicken meat (drained)
2 Tbsp collagen hydrolysate
1 Tbsp eggyolk powder
1/4 tsp granulated garlic
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp paprika powder

High speed for a couple minutes you want it totally liquified.

Then while blender is running:
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
blend for about .5-1 minute high speed

Then while blender is running:
1 Tbsp sodium alginate powder
blend for about .5-1 minute high speed

Next step variants:
Easy way: pour it into your dispenser bottles.
Original way: pour in bowl, let sit for 30+ minutes, scrap top layer of foamy bubbles off carefully, then pour into dispenser bottles.
Risk of easy way: you might have a few bubbles interfering with your squeezing the stuff out neatly.

You can do the next step now, or within a week if you store the batter in the fridge.

Maybe harder way: Put 7 cups water into the biggest bowl you have. Add 10g-20g of calcium lactate powder. (10g is recipe. I did that, and then 20g, made noodles MUCH bigger 2nd time. Texture was better 2nd time. Not sure if it’s noodle size or lactate amount but I figure it doesn’t hurt to be in the middle). Stir until dissolved, it will become clear. I was told that cold water works a bit better but that does make dissolving it harder so instead"

Easier way: pour 7 cups water the calcium lactate into clean blender, blend 30s till dissolved fully, then pour that into bowl. Do that BEFORE you make the noodles to simplify (blender is clean then) but be sure you rinse the blender after!!

In the bowl:
While stirring slowly to keep the water moving (keep your stir tool near middle of bowl so it’s not in the way), on the edge where the water is moving most, squeeze out your batter. The moment it hits the water it becomes a noodle. When bowl is getting full, put noodles to the side in a bowl to make room to do more. When fully done, put them all in that water and put it in the fridge for a few hours to firm up more.

They are ready to eat when you are, however you like.

This is about 1/4 batch. You see how the pressure I used in squeezing made the size of the noodle vary so much.

I used some batter for this that I’d left in the fridge for a few days as a test. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll be using the defrosted batter I had put into the freezer, to test that.

Various channels have tested cooking these in various ways. So far, dehydration is a fail, but baking, stiryfry, and just mixing into your soup or meatsauce works just fine.

I’m astounded this works. It’s like freaky magic. And they taste fine which is even weirder. But the texture is incredibly good, bit stretchy, just… it’s worth trying. The specialized ingredients do cost, esp. outside the USA. Lots of youtube videos on these in the keto world if you want to search.

If I get the very-modified-psmf breadish recipe to my liking, I’ll be on the meaty spaghetti and garlic bread diet.

Best,
PJ

[Camellia]

Wow, amazing write-up PJ. This is very Heston Blumenthal. Impressive!

My only concern is that in this long post you have only included one word on how they taste… “fine” Texture sounds spot on, but what about the flavour?

[RightNOW]

haha! I know what you mean – with keto foods you gotta be suspicious sometimes. (One of my first lowcarb ‘foods’ was people telling me that pork rinds and cinnamon tasted just like pancakes. I nearly left lowcarb altogether over that lol.)

So you can use any ingredients and that determines the taste. I combined different things in the hope of ending up with something that is “a taste but kind of neutral result” – and that worked pretty well I think. I took a super long very fat noodle and ate it totally plain, and that’s pretty much what I thought – “neutralish.” Wasn’t like “yum!” wasn’t like “ugh” was just “ok, fine.”

To be honest I don’t think regular spaghetti tastes like very much either. Maybe that’s just me. I’d say this was slightly ‘darker in mood of taste’ than regular pasta – the paprika alone would do that.

So in the end, I just want a result that I can use with a given sauce and it’s ok. I was using this with a heavy meat red sauce, but if I were going to be using it with say, chicken alfredo, chicken broth, chicken soup – then I would probably be good using all drained canned chicken for it. If I were using it with pesto, then red chili powders or spinach powder would probably be good. There is not much taste no matter what you make it out of – I mean it’s fairly mild – but if you taste it plain, you can taste a mild degree of all the stuff you put into it. I wasn’t sure what all I would be using them in so I was trying to find some generic middle-ground for taste.

To me, eating it in meaty spaghetti, it was just… spaghetti.

[Shinita]

Neutral sounds good… “Normal” eggless pasta is almost completely tasteless except the flour flavor, ew. I pretty much dislike the stuff. I always liked eggy pastas, without added water at the making (like my pancakes where the liquid is eggs but I don’t put flour into them either…).
If I fancy some pasta thing sometimes, I want to eat it with cheese. LOTS of cheese. That is the flavor, the pasta can be very neutral, that’s borderline fine.
(I want it to be eggy though :))

Looks too much work for something that doesn’t even tastes egg But I am an egg maniac. And we don’t have canned chicken here. [Oh I see eggs can be used… Hmmm. Oh spinach powder, I have a ton, sometimes I make spinach bread just to use some up, I am bad at throwing out things especially food.]
I never wanted spaghetti or similar stuff (and alas, my top fav is macaroni. I can’t make macaroni and it’s impossible to get eggy macaroni so I didn’t eat macaroni since very very very many years. or maybe once being desperate but it wasn’t eggy, wasn’t good why I didn’t put eggs on it, no idea. maybe I put it into soups), I quickly started to use eggs with something in it (oily seeds work well). So I have dumplings or crumbles…? I can pour a ton of cheese or poppy seed on it, almost overpowering even the tasty yolks just the same, no need for elaborated things

I still had some experiments in my life but those were thin ribbons. and not so good. Made from eggs and oily seeds or their flours but the flours aren’t tasty…
I didn’t even ever buy paleo pasta and the webshops I use are full with those.

And I do understand the fun in a spaghetti shaped thing. (Macaroni is STILL so much better Sometimes my heart aches a tiniest bit for macaroni…)
It’s still not needed, per se. And my experimenting way too much times are over. But maybe spaghetti for someone else is like crunchy biscuit for me… Or pancakes in the past, I experimented insanely much… I NEEDED it and couldn’t forget about it. I changed, now I can go WEEKS without pancake, it was unimaginable even some months ago. By the way, thin pancakes cut into ribbons can be used as pasta too. If that shape is fine.

But it’s interesting to read about these things, thanks!

[RightNOW]

Just make it with eggs instead of meat. The egg-fast version of the noodles is literally three hard boiled eggs as the protein source.

[collaroygal]

tI was a bit of a fun read but I got tired just reading about that process.

I’m sticking with zoodles, done in mins. using my spiralizer.

[RightNOW]

That’s what I get for being detailed lol. It technically takes about 3 minutes up front, maybe another 3-5 to pour into the water, then just wait a few hours.

Spiralizers are cool though. I have one… never used it. I like the veggies fine, they just don’t substitute for pasta for me alas. My friends have fed me spiralized stuff as pasta. It’s good, it’s just not spaghetti.

[RightNOW]

My third experiment is done.
The first was making the noodles fresh.
The second was leaving the bottle of batter in the fridge at least a couple days and then making them.
The third was leaving the bottle of batter in the freezer at least a couple days, then thawing it, and then making them.

There’s good news and bad news.

1. Does it thaw to batter again?
   A. Yes.

2. Does the batter make noodles again?
   A. Yes.

3. Do the noodles taste the same?
   A. Yes.

4. Do the noodles feel the same?
   A. Yes. …mostly.

5. So what’s the bad news?
   A. Maybe due to thawing the bottle was filled with air bubbles apparently. I was doing that “hard single-shake downward to get stuff to spout before you pour” to no avail.

It constantly broke stream, came out in tons of tiny blurps, spit air loudly (like when you are trying to drink nearly-empty glass of something with straw) and made “noodles with less integrity” even in the blips it created.

The best I could do, which did not get all of the batter out of the bottle because a lot of it was just sort of left on the inside (always the case but a bit moreso here it seemed), was get short bits like… well, you can see for yourself:

My conclusion is that you could freeze batter in a different container you could get a rubber spatula into, then once it is totally thawed, it should probably get blended briefly, then left on counter after some pounding for air bubbles to rise to top and be taken off before putting into a spout bottle.

So it’s not unworkable at all.

It just isn’t nearly as convenient as putting the spout bottle into the freezer indefinitely.

On the bright side that worked just fine for the fridge.

[RightNOW]

I put some of today’s spaghetti meal into a ramiken and baked it in the toaster oven, with some noodles right on top, to see what the result of baking on them would be. Would it change the texture? Would it take on that kind of nice dryness firmness that real pasta does? Worth a try.

1. Taste: fine no significant diff

2. Texture: it did get to the sort of ‘dry and stiffer’ like real pasta does, this was one of my questions, if pasta was on top like it would be with say baked mac & cheese, would the part on top get a little bit crispy or crunchy or what? Will it ever seem ‘dry’ for a pasta which when it comes into existence is just like wet boiled pasta? Worked just fine in baking on top.

3: Other: this is an anomaly. So… it shrunk. A lot. Now I will grant the particular noodle collection I had in that test was not the fattest noodles because I had eaten all those. But it was normal spaghetti noodles. After baking, they were the finest angel hair noodles. Apparently the baking partially dehydrates them and the 3 cups of water that are a key part of their manufactured existence… leaves. This did not result in anything bad mind you, in terms of taste or texture – but it says if you’re going to do something where the pasta is baking on exposed surface, maybe do some unusually fat noodles for that portion or learn to love the angel hair effect (which means you’d also want more of them since they are like 1/2 to 1/4 the volume). Plus you can’t over-bake it or you won’t have noodles at all.

FWIW.