I think it is fair to say that most women (or anyone watching their weight) have a love-hate relationship with pasta. It’s easy and comforting. But the carbs. Oh the carbs. I, personally, try to limit my pasta intake to once or twice a month. My husband, on the other hand, could eat it every. single. day. To compromise with him, I try different tricks to substitute or limit the pasta. My new favorite might just be this quinoa pasta I whipped up.
With the right tools, homemade pasta is actually really easy. Really, all pasta is is flour, eggs, and a little seasoning rolled thin and cut into strips (or some other fun shape). For this recipe, I replaced part of the flour with “quinoa flour”, which is dry quinoa processed into a fine “flour”.
The quinoa flour is much coarser than normal flour, so you may not be able to make fine angel hair pasta. But it works perfectly well with any pasta roller attachment for making fettuccine or pappardelle noodles.
Because of the graininess of the dough, I only rolled my noodles out to about a 3mm thickness on my pasta roller attachment for the KitchenAid. Then I cut them by hand with a pizza cutter to make thick papparadelle noddles.
I would love to give you a play-by-play of how to make pasta with a pasta roller, but the hard work has already been done by the fine folks at the Kitchn. And I probably couldn’t do it better myself.
Once you have the noodles, you cook them just as you would any other pasta noodle. But because they are fresh and not dried, they cook much faster. Almost too fast if you are not careful and take your eye off of the pot.
With my quinoa pasta, I just tossed the noddles with some store bought pasta sauce and some sauteed veggies for a quick and light meal. But I plan on making this recipe again and using the noddles for lasagna.