Recipes of the Month: Two low-carb pastas (that we probably won't use in future)

One of the things I've missed most on my new reduced-carb diet is pasta. Even the high-fiber varieties made from whole wheat, chickpeas, or red lentils, which my doctor once recommended as a healthier alternative to plain noodles, have more carbs per serving than I'm allowed to consume at a meal. So, much to my disappointment, this former staple has dropped out of our diet almost completely.

But lately, Brian has been experimenting with ways to bring it back. In the past week, he's tried versions of two of our favorite pasta dishes using alternative, lower-carb noodle alternatives. Both were kind of successful, but one was a lot more complicated than the other.

His first attempt involved making his own low-carb pasta from scratch, using the almond flour pasta recipe from Little Pine Kitchen. The only required ingredients are almond flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of xanthan gum, though the recipe suggests mixing in a bit of melted mozzarella to help hold it together. You mix all this up to form a ball of dough, then roll it out, cut it into pieces, and fry them in olive oil. This recipe, naturally, is very high in fat—18 grams per serving—and has 222 grams of sodium to boot. But, hey, only 3 grams of net carbs, so that's good, I guess?

Little Pine Kitchen provides directions for a variety of different pasta shapes, including cavatelli, farfalle, and orechiette. But Brian decided to try something different: making it into flat sheets and using those in a lasagna. Fried to a crisp, the almond-flour "noodles" certainly didn't look or taste anything like pasta; they were more like slightly crumbly crackers with an agreeably nutty, lightly salty flavor. But layered in a pan with sauce, spinach, and cheese, they did in fact produce something reasonably lasagna-like. The flat sheets didn't have the same texture as real lasagna noodles, but they did do the job of keeping the layers separated. Brian thought that in a way, they were superior to regular noodles, since the layers didn't tend to slide apart on your plate. And they certainly worked better than the previous low-carb substitute we'd tried, Palmini heart-of-palm "pasta," which not only lacked the flavor and texture of pasta but also slid around all over the place.

Nonetheless, I wasn't entirely convinced that this low-carb pasta substitute was really worth the amount of work that went into it. Since all the almond-flour sheets did was keep the layers separated, I suspected we could accomplish the same thing much more easily with a ready-made alternative, such as the Carb Balance tortillas we've been using for Mexican dishes. These would also most likely have a texture and flavor closer to noodles, if still not identical. And since they're much lower in fat and calories and higher in fiber, they'd probably be a healthier alternative too.

The other low-carb pasta substitution was a much simpler one: shirataki noodles. These low-calorie noodles, which you can find in the refrigerator case at many supermarkets, are made from a type of Japanese yam that's naturally low in carbs and high in fiber. The refrigerated packages are more or less ready to eat; all you have to do is rinse them and heat them up. An entire 7-ounce bag of them has just 10 calories and 6 grams of carbs—most of that from fiber. Their taste and texture aren't identical to regular pasta; they have a slightly stiffer chew and no flavor to speak of. But hidden under any kind of sauce, they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. 

Brian tried adding a bag of these to our new Brussels sprout pad Thai recipe, and the result was an unqualified success. They weren't quite the same as the rice noodles we used to put in our pad Thai, but their texture and flavor blended right in with the other ingredients and made the dish feel quite a bit more substantial than it had with nothing but veggies. He also tried mixing some of them with an equal volume of real spaghetti in a batch of pasta Romesco to create a carb-light version that I could eat a reasonable quantity of. If you looked carefully, it was possible to tell the individual strands of actual pasta from the shirataki, and if you tasted a bit of each separately, you could discern the difference in texture. But if you just twirled up a forkful of the combination and put it into your mouth, you'd never notice that what you were eating wasn't the genuine article.

So does this mean shirataki noodles are going to become a regular part of our diet moving forward? Well, maybe not. One problem is that they're a lot more expensive than regular pasta: around $3 for a 7-ounce bag, or about a cup of noodles. That's equivalent to about 4 ounces' worth of regular pasta, which even at today's prices costs less than 50 cents. So eating this stuff on a regular basis would definitely add quite a bit to our grocery bill. But if we knew we were going to be sticking with this low-carb regimen for the long term, it would probably be worth the cost to enjoy our favorite pasta dishes again.

But there's another, much bigger problem. After three difficult months on this low-carb diet, I just got my blood sugar retested, and it was actually higher than before. Apparently, I was doing a better job of controlling it on my previous diet, which was substantially higher in high-fiber carbohydrates. Remember all those foods I had to give up even though I'd always thought they were good for me, like fruit, whole-grain bread and pasta, beans, potatoes, popcorn, and winter squash? Well, it's starting to look like maybe they really were good for me—or at least better than the much higher-fat, higher-protein diet with more animal products (especially eggs, cheese, and fish) that I've been eating for the past few months.

I'm scheduled to discuss this with my doctor on Monday, and I'm hoping she'll give me permission to go back to my former mostly whole-food, mostly plant-based diet. If she does, then I can take all these tricks I've been using to keep my carb count down and toss them gleefully out the window. But even if she thinks I still need some kind of special diet to control my blood sugar, I'm going to push for one that's different from what I've been doing so far. Seeing as how it's made my life a lot more difficult and less enjoyable without, apparently, doing me any good, I see no reason to continue with it.