My partner's grandmother is from a small town outside Naples. She has been making pasta by hand since she was seven years old. She has opinions about pasta that I would describe as deeply held convictions.
Last Christmas I served her gluten-free pasta without telling her. I was curious. She ate a full bowl, had seconds, and said it was good. I told her what it was.
She put her fork down and looked at me like I had said something offensive.
I still don't know if that means the pasta was good or bad.
What actually makes pasta pasta
Conventional pasta is made from semolina — a coarse flour milled from durum wheat. Durum wheat is high in gluten, which gives pasta its elasticity when raw and its bite when cooked. That slight resistance when you chew al dente pasta — what Italians call the soul of the pasta — is largely a gluten thing.
When you remove gluten from pasta you have to find other ways to create structure. The most common alternatives are brown rice flour, corn flour, chickpea flour, lentil flour, and quinoa. Each behaves differently. Each tastes different. And each requires different cooking.
The rice pasta question
Rice-based pasta is the most common and the most neutral. Done well, it's genuinely close to conventional pasta in texture and holds up reasonably well to sauces. Done badly — overcooked by even ninety seconds — it becomes a starchy, gluey mass that sticks to itself and falls apart.
This is the central challenge of cooking GF pasta: the margin for error is much smaller. Wheat pasta has a window of several minutes between underdone and overdone. Rice pasta has a window of maybe two. You have to be paying attention.
The chickpea pasta conversation
Chickpea pasta divides people more than almost any food I can think of. Some people love it. Some people find the earthiness overwhelming. The texture is denser than rice pasta, the colour is yellower, and it holds its shape better when overcooked.
It also has substantially more protein and fibre than either wheat pasta or rice pasta, which matters to some people and not at all to others.
My honest take: it's not trying to be regular pasta and shouldn't be judged as if it is. It's its own thing. Pair it with bold sauces that can stand up to the flavour — a strong tomato, a pesto, something with anchovy — and it works well. Pair it with a delicate butter and sage and the chickpea flavour wins in a way you might not want.
How to cook GF pasta properly
Use more water than you think you need. Salt it properly — the water should taste like the sea. Bring it to a full rolling boil before adding the pasta. And then: watch it. Taste it early. Pull it when it's just barely al dente because it will continue cooking in the sauce. Don't rinse it — the surface starch helps the sauce adhere.
Finish it in the pan with the sauce for the last minute of cooking. This is how it should be done with wheat pasta too, but it matters even more with GF pasta because the sauce becomes part of the structure that holds it together.
What my partner's grandmother actually thinks
I asked her later, when she'd had time to process it. She said: it was fine. The texture was not right but the flavour was acceptable. She would not serve it to guests. She would eat it again if there was no other option.
From a Neapolitan grandmother, I'm choosing to interpret that as high praise.