Make a pleasing pasta

IT IS an inherently human thing to experience dissatisfaction.

While I don’t regard myself as an excessively spiritual person, the Buddha’s homilies on our familiarity with frustration and incompleteness resonate loudly. After all, who wouldn’t want the next best thing?

If you want to see this in action, just take a look at the behaviour of our kids. If you offer them an apple and there’s biscuits in the house, then the apple is insufficient. If you offer them biscuits and there’s ice-cream in the house, the biscuits will not satisfy. And so the cycle continues.

So too with my gluten-free friends. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not comparing you to children, I’m simply observing that the dissatisfaction you experience is inherent in the same unaffected way it is with even our youngest.

You can’t eat wheat, rye, barley and oats, yet you crave the pasta, bread, biscuits and pies that they create, and look with a sense of scorn at the inferior alternatives labelled gluten-free. It’s true, many gluten-free baked goods are chalky, flavourless and dry. Without the structural integrity offered by the glutinous proteins, it’s difficult to create a texture that satisfies.

And while I can’t always promise that baking will delight, I have managed to solve pasta. Indeed, I’d hazard that gluten-free spaghetti is not only as good as the traditional variety, it may well even be superior.

With just a little xanthan gum to stabilise it, it relies on the starch not the protein to hold its form.

Best of all, you don’t even need a pasta machine.

HANDMADE GLUTEN-FREE TAGLIATELLE ALL’AMATRICIANA serves / 4