A few summers ago, I lived in Italy—and almost broke my stomach. Sure, I have always had a delicate constitution, but while I was there, I decided to throw caution to the wind. Every morning I would wake up and eat a cornetto, for lunch I would have a piece of pizza rossa followed by a gelato with whipped cream, and for dinner, I would usually have a bowl of pasta amatriciana. Suffice it to say, I have been paying for this ever since.
Two months into this hedonistic lifestyle—in which I seemed to have forgotten that I am, in fact, a rather delicate flower—I began getting itchy eyes, swollen cheeks, and red blotchy skin. My Italian friend knew exactly what had happened, because the same thing had happened to her a few years before: it was the glutine. Luckily for my friend, her gluten intolerance—the greatest tragedy that can befall an Italian—was temporary. After a few months of abstemiousness, she was back on the sauce (and the noodles). For me, it took many weeks of steering clear of bread for my swelling to go down, and I’m still not all the way back to my normal bagel-eating form.
Okay, look. I don’t have celiac disease. I’m not medically gluten intolerant. Yet—and I understand why pasta purists might be mad at me for this—I mostly eat gluten-free pasta. In restaurants, I do whatever I want, because life is too short to allow your stomach to hold you hostage unless totally necessary. But if I’m at home? There is no semolina to be found.
I don’t need to rehash the discourse around why people should go gluten-free. The health benefits attributed to eating no gluten have been listed in every major medical and news publication, and refuted by just as many. Is “grain brain” real? I don’t know. I am not a medical doctor, and many doctors don’t seem to know for sure either. What I do know is that gluten-free pasta is often made from protein-rich ingredients like lentils and beans, which must be good—and that after I eat it, I don’t feel the overwhelming need to take a nap.
For me, the real problem with gluten-free pasta has always been finding brands that have the same springy, delightfully chewy texture as the regular kind. I’ve noticed that the difference between standard wheat supermarket pasta and artisanal varieties is often relatively narrow, whereas the difference between fancy gluten-free and cheaper supermarket gluten-free pasta can be vast. The cheaper gluten-free pastas are often loaded with gums and additives to make them chewier, which then dissolve into a strange, wet cardboard-y texture as you eat them.
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