... Bionaturae is an organic food company based in Tuscany, Italy.
(For those who wish to know a bit more about this condition with the unwieldy names, please scroll down to the note and links posted after the review.)
Of course, leave it to the Italians to come up with one of the best ... Read review
Advantages: As real as it gets; all organic, too! Disadvantages: None.
...the gluten-free pasta from bionaturae®. Bionaturae is an organic food company based in Tuscany, Italy.
(For those who wish to know a bit more about this condition with the unwieldy names, please scroll down to the note and links posted after the review.)
Of course, leave it to the Italians to come up with one of the best pasta substitutes currently available, at least on this side of the pond.***
Since ... ...spaghetti and its kin. Before bionaturae arrived at my local health food store, there were other pseudo-pastas made from white rice and brown rice and corn already on the shelves (DeBoles, Lundberg, etc. in the US). I tried out quite a number of them.
Alas, when cooked, these pasta imitations left much to be desired in the taste and texture departments. The stringy things were slightly gritty to the bite. They did soften with boiling, ... more
Read on if you’re one of those (or you know someone) who once blissfully sailed through life dining on that very ordinary dish of pasta—until you suddenly had to give it up along with a host of other everyday, wheat-based foods like bread, pizza, cakes and pastries. Or perhaps you’ve never even tasted real pasta before due to an affliction since childhood. And it’s all because of this condition called celiac/coeliac disease, aka gluten-sensitive enteropathy (GSE) or gluten intolerance.
Well, fellow celiacs, if you’ve yet to find an excellent gluten-free substitute for pasta, please welcome to your pantry the gluten-free pasta from bionaturae®. Bionaturae is an organic food company based in Tuscany, Italy.
(For those who wish to know a bit more about this condition with the unwieldy names, please scroll down to the note and links posted after the review.)
Of course, leave it to the Italians to come up with one of the best pasta substitutes currently available, at least on this side of the pond.***
Since having recently discovered to my great surprise a newly developing personal intolerance of gluten (a specific protein found in wheat, barley and rye, and products made from them), I’ve searched for months in vain for palatable substitutes for spaghetti and its kin. Before bionaturae arrived at my local health food store, there were other pseudo-pastas made from white rice and brown rice and corn already on the shelves (DeBoles, Lundberg, etc. in the US). I tried out quite a number of them.
Alas, when cooked, these pasta imitations left much to be desired in the taste and texture departments. The stringy things were slightly gritty to the bite. They did soften with boiling, but absorbed too little water to swell up. Eating spaghetti isn’t much fun when you have to chew on thin, dense, heavy, ropy, rubbery strands of “pasta.” That chore of a dining experience isn’t helped by a certain “watery” taste (the only way I can describe it), especially of the rice-based products. The many faux spaghetti brands I tried all sadly disappointed, and any hopes of ever again savoring a decent dish of spaghetti, fake or not, were dashed. The search for a better pasta had to continue.
That is, until the day bionaturae came to town. In my local organic/health food grocery, I noticed an unfamiliar product bearing a pale pink cellophane package decorated with a playful cartoon logo of an orangey sun peeking from behind a light green hill topped by a couple of olives and a stalk of wheat. Peering through the package window, I thought the noodles looked pretty much like all the other noodles I’d seen before. I really expected nothing special here, and yet, I would be happy if the pasta more closely approximated the real thing by just a wee fraction. The fact that it was made in Italy gave me a tiny ray of hope. After all, that’s where spaghetti and all those pasta varieties were born, isn’t it?
So I tossed the skinny (about 2 millimeters thick), creamy yellow-colored sticks into a saucepan filled with several cups of water just reaching a violent boil. I was nonchalant as the pasta went in. A fork worked nonstop to keep the individual noodles apart. I watched distractedly as the sticks softened and became whitish and a touch translucent—but soon my disinterest would morph into growing amazement as the noodles also swelled up to a plumpness virtually indistinguishable from that of real, semolina flour-based spaghettini, or thin spaghetti. This latest stovetop discovery sent me into a small, exciting, eureka!-like moment. There was some promise, it seemed, in this new pasta!
I drained the noodles after some seven minutes of cooking and transferred them to a plate. On top of the pile came a half cup of organic bottled marinara sauce, some freshly grated parmiggiano cheese and snippets of fresh Italian parsley. I mixed the whole thing up and dug in.
Well, I was disbelieving even as I ate. For the first time in months I finally remembered how wonderful spaghetti could be, something that had been lost to my taste buds’ memory. The noodles were tender but not mushy, with a slight resistance to the bite but no chewiness—in short, a perfect ‘al dente’. There was a nice, mild nuttiness that likely came from the soy flour. Although a hint of that distinctive rice-y flavor remained, it was muted enough to not ruin everything. The verdict? Of the handful of gluten-free pasta brands I’ve tried thus far, bionaturae’s spaghetti has come the closest to the genuine article. Here at last was pseudo-pasta that banished my envy of the real thing! I felt at peace! The search was over, at least for now. Bravo, bionaturae! was all I could say.
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Cooking bionaturae’s gluten-free pasta is no different from cooking regular pasta. That is, you bring the water to a rolling boil, sprinkle salt to taste and a tablespoon or so of olive oil to lessen sticking, adjust the heat to just maintain the boil, then toss in the pasta. It might be a culinary offense to some, but I break the noodles in the middle before adding them, and find them easier to handle thus.
Although the package suggests a cooking time of eight to ten minutes, I find that seven minutes yields perfect al ‘dente’ pasta for my taste. The longer you cook the pasta the more the rice starch leaches out into the water, and all you get are stickier and mushier noodles. Don’t walk away while cooking: constant stirring with a fork is a must to break up those noodles that get too intimate with one another, unless you prefer to take your spaghetti as thick, glued-together bundles of undercooked pasta. True to the claim on the package, rinsing the cooked bionaturae pasta to get rid of the rice starch isn’t necessary, which isn’t the case with the others; you have to halt the cooking process and remove excess starch by rinsing the other noodles in running cold water. Not so with bionaturae’s!
Bionaturae’s products come to many US grocery and health food/natural food stores directly from Italy, and the company claims its products are the top-selling organic pasta in the USA. Although similar natural food stores in the UK do offer bionaturae products, I’m unsure about their gluten-free line.***
Bionaturae use only organic ingredients in production. Rice flour, rice starch, potato starch and soy flour all go into the making of their pasta line. Those last two ingredients, potato starch and soy flour, seem to make all the difference in achieving that superior quality of bionaturae’s pasta, since their US competitors use only corn flour or rice flour in theirs. Besides spaghetti, bionaturae also do make gluten-free elbow, penne and fusilli, as well as a few other products (please see note below). Judging from the excellence of their non-flour-based pasta, I would guess that the rest of their products should also hold up well. I plan to try them out on non-celiac family and friends. Remember that they’re all organic, to boot!
I couldn’t agree more with the package blurb, a rare instance of realistic claims rather than marketing hype:
“Gone are the days when eating wheat and gluten free pasta meant sacrificing taste and texture. Now bionaturae provides you with a delicious gluten free pasta that cooks ‘al dente’. bionaturae gluten free pasta will satisfy your dietary needs while bringing pleasure to your table—in the spirit of Italian dining tradition! Buon Appetito!”
A reassuring note states that although the pasta is made “in a facility that produces other products which contain wheat…we test for the presence of gluten during each production cycle.”
And so, fellow pasta-loving celiacs, fill your plate with bionaturae pasta next time for a meal truly worthy of a hearty “Buon Appetito!”!
VERY BASIC FACTS ABOUT CELIAC/COELIAC DISEASE or GLUTEN INTOLERANCE:
In its milder forms, GSE or celiac/coeliac disease can cause chronic abdominal discomfort, bloating and diarrhea after consumption of even minuscule amounts of the offending protein, called gluten. The particular “enemy” gluten variety is the one found in wheat, barley and rye. Severe forms of the disease can cause striking nutritional deficiencies and can manifest as failure to grow or gain weight, anemia and even bone defects. People of European (especially Northern European) descent are most commonly affected, but recent studies show that the condition can be found in Hispanic, black and Asian populations, too!
To learn more about coeliac/celiac disease, go to:
http://www.coeliac.co.uk/ (UK)
http://www.celiac.com/ (USA)
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NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION:
The stated serving size is about 2 oz, so a 12-oz (340 g) package yields six (6) servings. This serving size sounds Lilliputian even for a 113-pounder like me. I can easily consume about twice that in one meal—sans bread, fake or not!
Nutrition facts per serving (percent daily values based on a 2000 calorie diet): Calories = 195. Sodium = 5g, total carbs = 43 g (14%), dietary fiber = 1 g (4%), sugar = 1 g, protein = 5 g; Fat = 0 g. Calcium = 2%, iron = 4% Vitamins A and C = 0% ________________
ABOUT BIONATURAE:
*** Bionaturae foodstuffs can be had in the UK, but I can’t be certain that bionaturae’s gluten-free products are also available. Perhaps the closest equivalent over there would be Glutafin, which uses maize, potato, rice and soy for their pasta, and is made in Italy. Bi Aglut, which is available in the US, seems identical to Glutafin in ingredients and origin. Bionaturae’s dispenses with the maize, though, and I’ve yet to try out Bi Aglut pasta.
Bionaturae also produce *regular* organic pasta in Semolina, Whole Wheat and Egg varieties; Fruit Nectars and Spreads; Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar.
More information about the young history of the bionaturae company, their wonderful artisanal philosophy of food production, their range of products and their vendors can be found on their website:
