Why you’ll want to spiralize
Turn vegetables into pasta-like strands and make inspired dishes
I came late to the spiralizer party. I’d never heard of the gadget that turns vegetables into noodle-like strands until about a year ago, when I started seeing dishes with names such as “Zinguine™” on restaurant menus.
The gluten-free and paleo crowd have been onto this tool for some time — it’s a terrific technique for those who love pasta but have a problem with wheat or with carbs. I’m not a member of either of those groups, but I’ve always loved the taste and texture of zucchini pasta, which I made, laboriously, with a vegetable peeler before I bought my spiralizer.
It turns out that the spiralizer is a great prep tool for all sorts of other vegetables, including onions, potatoes, celeriac and beets; and it does a lot more than just transform them into pasta. Pass an onion through the fine blade and you’ll get incredibly thin slices in less than a minute — and no tears. The tool is like a simplified and much less expensive version of a mandolin; and you don’t risk cutting off the tip of your finger when you use it.
This summer I’ve been using my spiralizer mainly to make vegetable pasta dishes. It’s perfect for this because many people crave lighter pastas when the weather is hot. Prep goes quickly and the cooking time for spiralized pasta strands, whether made with summer squash, celeriac, beets or rutabaga — can be less than a minute. Your stove won’t be on for long and your kitchen can stay cool.
Try using a mix of green and yellow squash ribbons — it makes for a gorgeous dish, and you can use up the mountains of summer squash your garden is producing or you pick up at the market.
Zucchini and other summer squash have a high water content and release water when they cook, and afterward. Because of this, it’s a good idea to avoid accompanying squash noodles with liquidy sauces; the juices from the squash will dilute them. The squash provides its own welcome moisture, and if you use enough salt in your cooking water, the juice that it releases will be tasty.
Celeriac, one of my favorite choices for vegetable noodles, doesn’t get watery when cooked. The noodles have a lot of flavor and are a better option to toss with tomato sauce than summer squash.
Spiralized vegetables also make wonderful stir-fries. I blanch them first, for just a minute, to ensure that the noodles are evenly cooked before I finish them in my wok with other stir-fry ingredients.
For those of you who find vegetable prep tedious, the spiralizer just may change your attitude about cooking. My sister, who has celiac disease and must avoid gluten in her diet, was visiting last winter when I was working on a collection of recipes for the spiralizer. After watching me turn out several dishes a day and being the happy recipient of one glutenfree pasta dish after another, she had an epiphany. “I realized that it’s not that I don’t like to cook,” she said. “It’s chopping that I don’t like.”