Top 5 Gluten-Free Pastas

There are so many new products rolling out to the the gluten-free market these days that I can’t keep up with them all. However, I do my best to try new items that are available in our area and those I’ve heard are great that I have to order online. The first consideration for me regarding gluten-free replacement type items has more to do with taste than anything else. The price and convenience factors are secondary considerations. My motto is the same as what I read once on a blog (and I can’t give proper credit here because I don’t remember where I saw it), I’d rather go hungry than eat horrible tasting gluten-free food.

For me, pasta is something I’ve always loved. Like many American kids, I grew up on the mac-n-cheese made from the famous blue box. My tastes grew more sophisticated when I went out into the world and had to buy my own food. For years we scoured the Atlanta dining scene for the hottest new restaurants. Capo’s in the Highlands was a favorite, as was Capo’s ex-wifes place, Lindy’s, in the Peachtree Battle area. We’d drive across town to Scalini’s in Marietta just for the garlic rolls and the fare at Ember’s Grill was hard to beat in Sandy Springs.

The biggest challenge I personally faced when dining out gluten-free was not being able to order pasta. Now we can have pasta at several places around town and hopefully, a smart chef or two will start offering the amazing fresh option from RP’s Pasta when it hits this region via restaurant distributors later this year. Thankfully, we can have amazing pasta at home any time  we want it. My top pasta list has changed a bit since posting this article, as I’ve tasted some new products since then.

The first pasta listed below is without question the best gluten-free pasta I’ve had to date. It is also better than many fresh gluten pastas we’ve had. The rest of pastas listed are not in any particular order.

• RP’s Pasta
• Le Venezianne
• BiAglut
• Andean Dream
• Schar

All of the above brands, and most other gluten-free pastas I’m aware of are MSG free. Some of them contain corn, soy, quinoa, rice and potatoes or a combination of those things. The only one that is made from one grain is Le Venzianne and it’s made from corn grown in a certain part of Italy near Venice. If you’ve tried corn pasta made here or in Canada and didn’t like it, you might give Le Venzianne a try. It is nothing like any of the other corn pastas we’ve tried. In fact, it’s hard to believe that two pastas made with the same basic ingredients could be so vastly different.

As far as I know, Tinkyada pasta (made from rice and rice bran) is the number one selling brand of gluten-free pasta in North America. It was the first gluten-free pasta we tried and we were not impressed. That product line fills the need for many allergen-free consumers since it’s free of corn, soy, dairy, wheat and gluten.  For budget friendly gluten-free pasta, the options from Heartland Pasta are worth checking out. Several online website sell the pasta listed above including, but not limited to, Amazon.com.