If you cook our pasta expecting it to behave like the dried semolina pasta you buy in a supermarket, some of it will disappoint you. Pieces will break. The carrot pasta will come out of the water noticeably paler than it went in.
We would rather explain this than quietly fix it.
What holds normal pasta together
Conventional dried pasta is made from durum wheat semolina, and it works because of gluten. When semolina is hydrated and extruded, gluten proteins form an elastic network that traps starch and holds the shape through twelve minutes of rolling boil. It is a genuinely elegant piece of food engineering.
Manufacturers who make gluten-free pasta usually rebuild that network chemically — with mono- and diglycerides, xanthan or guar gums, modified starches, or a proportion of maida blended back in. It works. The pasta holds. You would never know.
What we use instead
Sprouted legume and millet flour, and a natural binder — cluster bean powder, psyllium husk, or a little tapioca. That is it. No emulsifiers, no synthetic binders, no maida.
Cluster bean powder and psyllium do a reasonable job. They do not do as good a job as gluten. So a proportion of every batch will break during cooking, particularly the shapes with thin sections.
And the carrot colour
The orange in our carrot multigrain pasta is dehydrated carrot powder. The compounds responsible — carotenoids — are partly water-soluble and leach into the cooking water. A synthetic pigment would not do that. That is rather the point of a synthetic pigment.
How to lose less of it
- Use plenty of water and a wide pan, so the pieces are not crowded and grinding against each other.
- Salt the water, but do not boil it violently — a steady simmer is kinder than a rolling boil.
- Stir gently, twice, with a wooden spoon rather than tongs.
- Pull it at the early end of the stated time. Five minutes for the carrot pasta, seven for the penne.
- Drain and toss immediately with a little oil or ghee.
The trade we made
We could add the gums. It would cost very little, the pasta would hold perfectly, and almost nobody would ask. But then the ingredient list stops being four honest things and starts being four honest things plus a stabiliser, and the reason to buy it from us disappears.
So: it breaks a bit. Cook it slightly less, stir it slightly more gently, and it is fine.