Catelli Gluten Free Pasta

Hey!

I'm still spending all my time on school, but a girl's gotta eat, right? I thought that I would talk a little about what has been going on in my life over the past few months. 

Over the summer, I noticed that my sense of my smell was starting to degrade. I've never had a really stellar nose to start with, so I let it go for a little bit, until it got to the point that I couldn't smell anything at all. It was starting to be alarming. The only good news was that it didn't affect my taste any, which just made it more strange. I went to see a string of doctors, ending with an allergist. After a series of tests, he suggested that I cut gluten out of my diet completely and see if I felt a difference. 

These days, gluten free food is becoming more and more in vogue, with both the popularity of trend diets, as well as the increase in awareness of gluten intolerance including celiac disease. On a lot of cooking shows, they talk a lot about your 'food history'.  You know, who taught you to cook, what kinds of foods have influenced you growing up, things like that. I learned to cook from my mother, and she owned a restaurant for a time that offered quite a few gluten free options. The problem that I found there is that things that are not usually gluten free, like pasta and bread, taste terrible when you try to make them gluten free.

Immediately after seeing the doctor, I cut out everything that had the gluten in it. I began feeling better immediately. It was great. Buutttttt...I’ve been cheating. Sometimes I need to have some bread. Some good, white baguette. I need it. Or pasta. Oh pasta. After a hard day, it’s spaghetti time. Because I don’t have the same debilitating symptoms that a lot of people with food intolerances have, I can get away with this, but I wish that I didn’t have to.

Catelli has a new gluten free line of pasta out, available in fusilli, penne, and spaghetti. It also takes care of the issue that many gluten free packaged goods have of being too expensive, at about $3 a box, not much more than regular.

But what about taste? And texture?

My friend Kathleen and I had a little taste test. In one pile, we have plain white Catelli spaghetti, and in the other is the GF spaghetti.

Gluten free is on the left. Hard to tell though!

In general observations, the GF pasta took less time to cook, about 8 minutes to the regular pasta’s 12. The water was also much cloudier when the GF pasta was cooking. But taste? There’s no difference. Really, honestly. In terms of taste, they’re exactly the same. The texture is different, but not noticeably so. It’s slightly grainy, a bit more chewy, but more than palatable. Once you put some kind of sauce on them, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Good job, Catelli. A+. It’s exactly what I was looking for, it’s not too expensive and it’s the same comfort food I was looking for.

I can highly recommend. 

Update: A representative from Catelli reached out to me and offered a mail-out coupon for $1 off any Catelli Gluten Free Pasta. You can find the coupon here!