Our pals at Rio Vista Olives sent us the incredible oil that we cook with in this post. Like everything that we recommend on our blog, we use and love their products, and hope that you will too!
The Story
We’re regularly asked about gluten-free pasta, and to be honest the only reason that we haven’t blogged about it yet is that it feels a little too simple to put on a recipe card. Which of course is no reason at all. So this week, please accept our apologies for not posting it sooner, and enjoy our recipe for gluten-free reginette. Note that reginette normally has ruffled edges, as opposed to only frilled, but it’s a tricky thing to do when you’re cutting your pasta by hand!
There are many complicated recipes floating around out there to guide you through the alchemy of creating your own gluten-free flour mix, but we’re going to keep it simple. We just swap out our regular flour for store-bought plain GF flour, and throw in some xanthan gum. The key isn’t so much in the ingredients as it is in understanding the role of gluten, and the considerations of using a gum in its place (this includes knowing its limitations). We’ve made GF pasta a number of times now, and though it can be a little frustrating pulling it together, it’s always produced a springy, satisfying meal.
So in simple terms, non-GF pasta ‘works’ because of the proteins collectively known as gluten. Just about every week we highlight and discuss the flour that we’re using in terms of its gluten content, its elasticity, and its strength. When we mix our flours we do consider flavour, but more so we’re after the perfect balance of these structural aspects, as suited to the pasta that we’re intending to make. When we knead, we’re forming and strengthening the bonds that hold it all together, and when we let the dough rest, we’re allowing the gluten to relax a bit so that it can be shaped into pasta. What does that mean for gluten-free pasta-making? Throw it all out the window: it’s time to relearn pasta dough!
The Pasta
If you were to swap in GF flour without adding xanthan gum (or similar), your pasta would just fall apart. That said, even with xanthan gum it can be difficult to achieve some pasta shapes. So we’re going to give you a quick recipe for GF reginette (or mafaldine, depending on who you ask), and you can skip straight through to that if you like, but we’re also going to test out a few other pasta shapes using that same dough. Read on if you’d like to see how it holds up!
A perk of GF pasta is that you only have to knead it for long enough to remove any clumps (as there’s no gluten to activate), and you don’t need to rest it before getting down to business. That small amount of gum goes a long way, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly the dough hardens up once it meets the eggs, so don’t be tempted to overdo it otherwise your pasta will be very hard to work with!
Mix your flour, salt, and xanthan gum together, and form that iconic pasta well. Then drop your eggs into the centre, and bring it all together with a fork or your hand. If you have a food processor, we do recommend that you start it off in there to ensure even distribution of ingredients, but you may need still to squash it together by hand after you’ve pulsed it a few times.
Chop the dough into quarters and roll it through the pasta machine’s thickest setting, before gradually stepping it through to a 5 or 6 (medium thickness). Of course you can always use a rolling pin, flattening it out into sheets of around 1.5-2mm thickness (we tend to keep our GF pasta slightly thicker to offset its brittle nature). Now, here’s the thing: rolling out GF dough take’s some patience. Firstly, it needs to be squashed rather than stretched, so before you feed it into the machine do yourself a favour and flatten it out as best you can with your hands or a rolling pin. Then be prepared for lots of holes and tears. Just keep folding it back over itself to cover the gaps, and rolling back through those wider machine settings until you have a workable sheet that you can incrementally thin. Any ragged edges can be trimmed off in the next step.
Then lay out sheets of around 30cm length on a lightly floured surface and form your reginette with a frilled rolling pastry cutter.
Pasta machines like the Atlas 150 come with fettuccine and tagliolini cutters, so we cut some of this dough with them too, just to show you that it can be done! The tagliolini was quite delicate and required careful handling, but the fettuccine was robust and could be tossed around.
In the past I’ve found that gluten-free pasta is best served same-day. It will keep for a few days in the fridge, but you don’t stand to benefit from the resulting dehydration (in terms of chewiness) like you would for pasta containing gluten.
We cooked it up and served it with our pink peppercorn brown butter and a bit of parsley, but it goes just as well with a light tomato sauce or a pork shoulder ragu, if you feel like treating yourself. Although it’s quite brittle as it’s being made, once cooked it can withstand being stirred through the heartiest of sauces.
Note that we often throw some puréed spinach into our GF dough, as that highly-refined flour taste can sometimes be a bit strong, and the spinach balances it out. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can simply adapt our spinach fettuccine recipe, using the same ratio of xanthan gum to flour as in this recipe.
Hopefully this helps someone out there. As always, get in touch with any questions. Buon appetito!
– Al & Al.
Equipment
- Food processor
- Air tight container for resting
- Pasta roller and cutter (if not using a rolling pin and knife)
- Pastry/pasta cutting wheel
Ingredients
- 200 g plain gluten-free flour
- 2 eggs
- 40 ml water
- 1.5 tsp xanthan gum
- Splash olive oil extra virgin (we used Rio Vista Olives’ Vintage Range Augusto)
- Pinch salt
Instructions
- Combine all ingredients in a food processor and blitz for 30-60 seconds. It should be soft enough to squash together in between your fingers, but not sticky; adjust and re-pulse with a small amount of water or flour if too dry or wet, respectively. Alternatively, form a well of the dry ingredients, adding the wet to the centre and bringing together with a fork or your hand.
- Remove to a lightly floured board and form into a tight ball. Cut this into 4 pieces, and flatten each down as much as possible with your hands and/or a rolling pin. It will tear and form holes quite easily – just continue to recombine until you have rough sheets. Store what is not being worked on in an airtight container.
- If you don't have a pasta machine, continue to roll the dough out to a thickness of roughly 2mm. Otherwise, begin feeding the dough through the machine starting at the thickest setting and working incrementally up to a medium setting of 5. Expect this to get a bit messy and difficult, but don't give up! When a hole appears, just fold the dough over itself to cover, and then pass it back through on the same setting. You may need multiple passes on the thicker settings, before progressing to thinner widths.
- To form your reginette, lay out sheets of pasta roughly 15cm by 30cm, and then use a fluted cutting wheel to cut lengths of approximately 10mm width. Toss pasta lightly in flour and then transfer to a baking paper lined tray.
- Bring a pot of lightly salted water to the boil and drop the reginette in, cooking until al dente or until there is no longer any white visible in the centre of the pasta when cut into. Roughly 2-3 minutes. Retain a cup of pasta water, and drain.
- Although brittle as they're being made, this pasta is fairly robust once cooked, so serve it with any sauce of your choosing. This time around we simply tossed it through our pink peppercorn brown butter, and served it with some chopped parsley and a crack of pepper.
