Do any alternative pastas actually taste good?

Of all the carbs, I’ve loved pasta the longest and in the most guises. 

An old friend, with whom I lived for almost seven years, only ever cooked packet spinach and ricotta tortellini. Whenever I wasn’t on dinner duty, in went the packet tortellini and out came the little jar of pesto. “It’s a treat every time!” she said, and it was. Now I live with my partner, a pasta snob: he makes his own, blithely dusting the entire kitchen with a thin but persistent coating of 00 flour, and turns his delicate nose up at anything from the shops. 

“This is what pasta is,” he announces, triumphantly, holding up his translucent ribbons. “Eggs. Durum wheat. That’s it! So simple.”

I agree with him wholeheartedly, but he is in fact wrong. There is a whole shelf in the supermarket dedicated to pasta made out of everything except the things you would expect it to be made of. Lentil pasta. Chickpea pasta. Pasta made out of rice.

According to Ocado, searches for “protein pasta” have more than doubled over the past two years, and many alternative pasta products are on the rise. There are 14 separate kinds of alternative pasta available at Tesco; 13 at Waitrose.

This feels like a strange phenomenon. The “fake food” boom was years ago — meat-free burgers that really bled, fake bacon that really crackled. Now Quorn sales are down and fresh tofu sales are up. Ultra-processed foods are unfashionable, and the veganism that fuelled many of these alternatives has increasingly given way to a focus on ethical “real” food. Michael Pollan’s famous instruction to eat nothing “your grandmother would not recognise as food” has gone from foodie niche to conventional wisdom.

But I suppose my grandmother would recognise a corn-based fusilli as pasta. At least, on sight. On taste, it might be a different matter.

I was intrigued.

The pasta alternatives, when they arrived, covered the kitchen table. My partner looked at them dubiously. “So there’s roughly three kinds,” I said cheerfully, pointing at the three piles. “These are for dietary needs, these are for dieters and the third category is misc. Kelp! Sea spaghetti! Cauliflower gnocchi! Buckwheat!”

I flipped the package of sea spaghetti over, and read the serving suggestion. Take 15g of sea spaghetti, and add . . . 300g tagliatelle? I could get on board with this. It has actually long been my contention that courgetti — courgette thinly sliced with a spiraliser — is at its best in a 50/50 ratio with regular spaghetti, perhaps with a light and lemony aglio-olio-type sauce. 

On closer inspection, the same thought had clearly occurred to the makers of several of the high-protein pasta brands: 55 per cent durum wheat, 45 per cent red lentil flour; 50 per cent cauliflower, and the rest rice flour and potato. One of the fancy Italian brands boasted no less than seven different starches, plus an emulsifier. My partner, fresh from reading Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People, raised his eyebrows. “And this is better for you than making pasta?”

It had to be a fair test. I would make a tomato sauce; I would make a cheese sauce; I would cook a spoonful of each pasta, one after the other, and taste a little by itself and a little with each sauce. I had a spreadsheet with a column for notes, and a row for each of the 14 pasta substitutes.

I began with the coeliacs. It says something about the immense popularity of pasta that even people who can’t eat pasta need to be able to eat pasta, sort of like non-alcoholic beers.

The vegetable and rice spirals looked hopeful — red, green and white, the full tricolore like you might find at Bologna airport. 

Unlike airport pasta, they tasted sort of like the rice-paper wrapping of a spring roll. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it was a strange sensation. A lot of chewing for something already dissolving. Then again, with cheese it tasted like cheese; with tomato it tasted like tomato. I could see the use of this one, which was not a bad place to start.

The rice and corn macaroni was actually even better. With cheese sauce it was essentially indistinguishable from any other nursery-tea mac and cheese. If I were a kid with allergies, I thought, I would be happy to be eating something so very close to what the other kids were eating. I couldn’t really imagine it in an adult context, but maybe it didn’t matter.

I felt good for the gluten-free children with these cheerful normal-looking packets of fine-tasting pasta. I refilled the kettle and put two pans of water on, feeling like a midwife of the past, all steam and clean towels, efficient and full of hope.

The rice and quinoa spaghetti was truly not bad. With sauces, not bad at all, just a little sticky. The same was true of the red lentil pennette, and the fancy chickpea and rice fusilli. Not perfect, but not bad. Both came in packaging familiar to artisan shops that are mostly full of soap dispensers and incense. A score for the hippies.

Next, the packets for the big boys: 12g PROTEIN per SERVING, the red one yelled. On the green one, the copy promised to drive your meals to the next level with protein-powered Green Pea Penne. The arrows in the logo suggested vigorous movement. More stressful still was the zero-carb noodles made of two separate kinds of fibre and nothing else. Oat fibre I knew, but konjac flour? I googled it and wished I hadn’t.

Konjac noodles, I found, were a traditional Japanese thing: gelatinous, translucent, some kind of yam. These were not those, and neither thing was pasta. Side effects, I read, could include intestinal discomfort, bloating, excessive flatulence, and, in rare cases, hospitalisation. I eyed my cupboard of delicious normal pasta wistfully. I never fear death while eating spinach and ricotta tortellini.

I scooped some green pea penne into a bowl. It smelled like an unclean fish and chip shop. It tasted like that too. The chickpea fusilli fell apart into small, distinct grains in the mouth. It tasted exactly like not-great chickpeas. The buckwheat fusilli was hard to describe. “It’s sort of like . . . when you see a pile of very old, wet newspapers at Old Street station,” said my partner thoughtfully. The tomato sauce covered a multitude of sins, taste-wise, but it was hard to escape the textures. There were many textures. None of them were very like pasta. To paraphrase the great Douglas Adams: they were almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pasta.

“I think you’re on your own from here,” said my glamorous assistant, swilling his mouth out over the sink. I refilled the saucepans and started again.

The Protein Rigatoni had 12g of protein per serving. It was, I noticed, also mostly made of durum wheat: mostly regular pasta, but with red lentil mixed in for the gym bros. It was fine. It was uninspiring. It was like regular rigatoni, but a little bit worse, and for what? The kelp did not help. It had to be softened in baking soda and lemon juice; then eaten raw. It might, I think, have been acceptable with soy sauce. With cheese it was an abomination.

The konjac noodles stared me down. Nine calories per 100g. I googled it again to check. “Don’t eat more than about 40g,” I read. “100g is fine, if you have no other fibre in your diet.” I tried to add up how much fibre I had consumed in other faux-pastas, plus the bagel I ate for breakfast. I feared the zero-carb noodle. I feared flatulence and death. It was hard to think of the zero-carb noodle as having health benefits. It was, in essence, a diet food.

The abundance of pasta alternatives suggests a desire to have it all, and to be seen to have it all, like a supermodel ordering an enormous burger in front of the interviewer for a glossy magazine. It is a deception, and it made me uneasy. I do not like thinking about the sheer impossibility of the cultural requirement to simultaneously eat plenty of delicious pasta with insouciance and abandon, and still maintain the physique of someone who eats only a Victoria Beckham-esque sliver of steamed fish. The Tudors did it the other way around, and it was better. They ate caviar on a fast day, called it “peas” and hoped God wouldn’t mind.

I sat on the floor for a long time. By this point, my spreadsheet had gone to pot. I had eaten 12 kinds of fake pasta, and I felt very far from the sight of God. Then I got up and boiled the kettle again, made a cup of tea and put the spelt spaghetti on to cook. I drained it and tossed it with some olive oil. It was delicious. I tried it with some sea spaghetti (not a pasta substitute but a misleadingly named seaweed). Also delicious. I added black pepper and cherry tomatoes. I found a lemon, zested it over. Some crispy shallots from a jar. Chilli flakes. A little parmesan. 

I ran down the hall and jammed a forkful into my boyfriend’s unsuspecting mouth. “It’s better, isn’t it?” I cried. “I would eat this! I would eat this by choice! A pasta alternative that’s as good as actual pasta!”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Is this spelt?” he said, finally.

“It is!” I said.

“Spelt is actually just a kind of wheat,” he said, very gently. I looked at him. I looked at my bowl of actual pasta, full of gluten and carbs. I ate another forkful. It was so, so delicious. Hello, old friend.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram