Quinoa coupon tips off quest for gluten-free mac and cheese worth the effort
In my quest for a good substitute for today's highly-hybridized wheat pasta, quinoa (keen-Wah) popped-up on my radar screen. Actually, a dollar-off coupon pointed me toward a quinoa-based pasta.
First, a little history. More than 20 years ago, I wanted to get away from wheat-based pasta and tried wheat-free pastas. I remember an all-corn pasta which I'd hoped would be equal to wheat pasta; it wasn't close. The brown rice pastas I tried didn't make the grade either. Both flavor and texture missed the mark by quite a bit.
At that time, properly cooked rice noodles purchased from an Asian market were the best substitute for wheat I'd yet tasted. Surprisingly, spaghetti sauce ladled over rice noodles was and still is amazingly good, and seemed much less filling that wheat-based pasta.
In later years, I turned to whole-wheat pastas and found some of them (Bionaturae Organic 100 percent Whole Wheat Spaghetti was a favorite) to be really decent; cooking whole wheat pasta just right made a big difference in the end result, though. Too short a cooking time and it was grainy; too long and it was mush. The nutty flavor coming from whole wheat added a positive flavor layer.
Today's highly-hybridized wheat doesn't have anything to do with genetically modified organisms agriculture. HH wheat has, starting in the 1950s, gone through a crossbreeding process to make it potentially hardier to grow, definitely shorter (the heavier seed heads of today's wheat broke the slim, taller stalks of early wheat) in height and higher in gluten content.
Gluten-sensitivities and that buck-off coupon led me to Ancient Harvest's gluten-free Supergrain Elbow Pasta ($3.89 for 8 ounces), an organic corn and quinoa blend. The use of the hyperbolic term “supergrain,” a registered trademark, refers to the quinoa.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: “Quinoa is an Andean plant which originated in the area surrounding Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia. Quinoa was cultivated and used by pre-Columbian civilizations …” This makes quinoa 5,000 to 7,000 years old.
What's so super about quinoa? Quinoa has about 10 percent less carbohydrate and 10 percent more protein than wheat and zero gluten.
Having missed wheat-based macaroni and cheese got me thinking about testing Ancient Harvest's gluten-free elbows by making quinoa/corn pasta macaroni and cheese.
The cooking time for quinoa/corn macaroni is about 8 minutes. I tested it at 7 minutes and went the extra minute because it wasn't quite done. While it cooked I got everything ready to turn it into mac and cheese.
How did it turn out? Terrific.
Although quinoa/corn pasta doesn't have the distinctive flavor that wheat-based pasta has, it had a smooth texture and my mac and cheese turned out … well … wonderful.
My mac and cheese recipe is an authentic mac and cheese. The only thing I did was trim some fat and calories my using a reduced-fat cheddar cheese. Give it a try.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@ theleanwizard.com.