Gluten Free Favorites - BiAglut Pasta

(Note: This pasta is made with lupine flour, which is closely related to peanuts. If you are allergic to peanuts, you won't be able to eat this product.)

When you first go gluten free, you tend to get stuck on all of the things you can't have. You go to the local grocery store and find the two gluten free products they have and it's just awful. Nothing tastes right. Nothing has the same texture. When I first went gluten free, pasta was a disappointing experience at best.

Don't get me wrong. Most widely available gluten free pasta is okay. Many in a better than nothing kind of way unfortunately. I was fine with it. But my husband? He wasn't. He can't deal with weird textures. So when gluten free pasta fell apart or got mushy, he just couldn't eat it.

A few times I made two seperate pastas. Two pots of water. Two strainers. Two bowls. Too much work. Too much trouble. Too many chances for cross contact. It just wasn't worth it to me to have to go through that much work just have to pasta that was only so-so.

So for a while there, we just didn't have pasta. My husband doesn't have to eat gluten free, so if he really wanted pasta he'd just have it at lunch.

It wasn't long after that that I saw some people raving about Bi-Aglut Pasta. It's made in Italy with corn and lupine flours.

I found a place online that sells it and placed an order. I wasn't expecting much. I was just hoping for something that had a texture that my husband could tolerate a little better.

When we got it, I think Patrick made goulash. We had switched over to rice as the base rather than pasta. We figured if it was really awful we'd just make some rice. Like I said, we weren't expecting anything special. I had ordered fusilli, which is the spiral pasta.

Once the Bi-Aglut was cooked we were both really surprised at how well it held together. Then amazed at how much it tasted like regular pasta. Then just flabbergasted at the texture. It was perfect. I think we both said wow a dozen times while we were eating. It was holding its shape. It was when we went back for more and saw that the pasta in the strainer hadn't hardened up or disintigrated into tiny pieces that we were really sold. It looked and acted just as it had when we poured it into the strainer.

The best thing about this pasta is that you can serve it to non-GF people and they don't notice the difference. One year we hosted Christmas Eve and Patrick made his goulash with the Bi-Aglut Fusili. In the middle of the dinner, my mother-in-law asked me what I was eating with the goulash. It took me a minute to realize what she was asking. She thought that she and the rest of the family were eating regular pasta and I was eating something different. Now that's a testament to how good Bi-Aglut is.

You can find Bi-Aglut by doing a websearch. I usually order mine from Gluten Free Trading Company. None of my local gluten free stores carry it, so we order it by the case.

If you try Bi-Aglut pasta, let me know what you think, and what your non-GF friends and family think.

What are your gluten-free favorites?

Nancy