Tag Archives: gluten free

Primalgirl Cooks: Paleo Pasta Part Two

Posted on by
2
No Gravatar

PastaAustin and Houston were amazing, thanks for asking! Okay, you didn’t ask, you’re waiting for the pasta recipe. Sorry to those of you on the East Coast, I promised you dinner for Monday night. I forgot about the time difference and the ass-pain of airport security. To those on the West Coast, you’re welcome. O_o

Here goes. Hopefully you made your sweet potato, yam or plantain flour. If you didn’t, you can experiment with other flours such as rice, quinoa, sorghum, finely milled almond flour, or other gluten-free flours that you’ve found don’t give you gastric distress. The basic recipe is as follows:

Paleo Pasta

Ingredients

  • 140 grams sweet potato flour or a combination of flours.
    (Please see note below if using almond flour.)
  • 60 grams tapioca starch
  • 2 egg yolks
  • 4 whole eggs
  • 1 tsp salt

Note: If you want to use almond flour, I suggest making the following changes with regards to flour, unless you want to add xantham gum and/or guar gum to help the pasta hold together. All the other ingredients (eggs and salt) remain the same. Almond flour is not starchy at all and doesn’t absorb the liquid from the eggs very well. This causes a couple different problems. First off, if you simply follow the regular recipe and just substitute some almond flour, your dough will be wet and sticky. If you don’t use finely milled almond flour, or you use too much, your dough will have chunks in it and it will break apart if you try to roll it out too thin.

Option 1
Option 2
• 120 grams starchy flour
• 40 grams almond flour
• Extra tapioca or arrowroot powder for rolling out the dough
• 100 grams starchy flour
• 40 grams almond flour
• 80 grams tapioca starch
• Extra tapioca or arrowroot powder for rolling out the dough

Directions

Get your water boiling. I like to add salt and olive oil to the water, but I’m not sure it’s terribly necessary.

If you have a stand mixer, add all the dry ingredients to the bowl and blend to combine. If you’re using a regular mixing bowl, whisk or use a fork instead. (For the following steps, imagine your hands are the stand mixer’s paddle and just follow along. Go wash your hands first, though.)

Make a well in the center of the flour and dump the eggs in. Blend with the stand mixer or use a fork until it’s mostly combined. (You can finish it off when you knead it.)

Turn the dough out onto a clean, flat working surface, lightly dusted with tapioca, arrowroot or other flour if your dough is a little sticky. Knead it by hand until it’s smooth. If it feels a little dry, you can add a teaspoon of olive oil. It’s it’s too wet, add a sprinkle of whatever flour you want until it’s perfect. Your dough should feel silky and smooth and should not be sticky.

I like to wrap the dough in plastic wrap to keep it from drying out. You won’t be able to roll it all out at once and it will dry out and crack if you just leave it sitting on the counter.

Either use a rolling pin and roll out about 1/4 of the dough as thinly as you can, or put small chunks of it through your pasta roller until it’s the desired thickness. Because this has eggs in it, it puffs up a bit when you cook it. If you don’t get it pretty thin, you’re going to have very thick pasta. It will take longer to cook and you may not be happy with the result.

Cut the pasta to your desired shape, using a pastry wheel, an attachment on your pasta roller or a plain old knife. If you’re making spaghetti or other long noodles, it helps to use a pasta drying rack to keep them from sticking together. However, when I started out, I simply used a cookie sheet and separated layers of pasta with wax paper. I DO love my pasta rack, though. It’s way faster and easier. Once you’ve got them hanging up, or lying flat but separated, it’s okay if they start to dry out.


To cook the pasta, put it in boiling water and cook for about 3 minutes. Ravioli will take a little longer, approximately 6 minutes. Once it has started to float towards the surface, take a piece out and taste it. Act quickly — pasta like this can quickly turn from perfect to mush if you’re not careful. Once it’s done, drain and serve with your favorite sauce.

I’ll be posting pictures of my ravioli on Facebook and Twitter tomorrow, once I get my husband up out of bed and he finds the camera for me. I’ll also try to post a recipe for my pumpkin sage cream sauce soon for those of you that are nightshade free.

Enjoy! I hope this works as well for your family as it has for mine. I’d love to hear about your experiences, the different flours you used and what you thought of the recipe in the comments.

Primalgirl Cooks: Paleo Pasta Part One

Posted on by
5
No Gravatar

For those of you that caught my tweet the other day, you’ll know that I have come up with a Paleo pasta recipe.

That’s right: PASTA. I’m not talking zucchini noodles, spaghetti squash or those disgusting  zero-carb shirataki noodles that smell like fish. I’m talking real, honest-to-goodness pasta that you can turn into lasagna, spaghetti, fettuccine, ravioli or whatever the hell you want.

It’s grain-free, gluten-free, guar and xantham gum free and 100% Paleo. It does take a bit of work though, but trust me when I say it’s worth it.

This whole adventure started when George Bryant over at www.civilizedcavemancooking.com posted a recipe for beef bacon ravioli. I’ve been missing Italian food something fierce lately so I eagerly clicked on the link. To my dismay, I discovered that George hadn’t made the pasta himself, but had gotten it from Capello’s Gluten Free Products and that it was $55.00 for 4 12-oz packages. Not only can I not afford $55 for pasta that will make approximately 2-3 meals (my kids eat A LOT), but the ingredient list left a little to be desired: almond flour, cage-free eggs, tapioca flour, potato starch, xantham gum, sea salt. My children and I can’t eat potato.

I spent the next two weeks coming up with what I think is the perfect Paleo pasta recipe and although it takes a lot of time and preparation, it does NOT cost $55.00. It’s not low in carbs, but it doesn’t have any gut irritating substances in it. Treat it like a moderation food on the Primal diet: you don’t want to start eating it every day but there’s no reason you can’t have it once a week.

I’m about to leave for Texas for a weekend of Primal Transformation Seminars, but before I go, I wanted to leave you guys with the recipe for the flour that you’ll need for the pasta. That gives you all weekend to play around and make the flour, and when I get back on Monday, I’ll be posting the full recipe so that you can Paleo Pasta for dinner Monday night.

You’ll also want a couple other things while you’re at it.

Pasta Making Accessories:

  1. a heavy rolling pin or a pasta roller. (I personally opted for the pasta roller after spending hours trying to roll the pasta out thin enough. It’s practically the same price as the rolling pin, after all and sooo much freakin’ faster.)
  2. a pastry wheel or a pizza cutter.
  3. a kitchen scale. I don’t use cups or teaspoons; that way you can substitute whatever flour you want and the recipe will still work.

sweet potatoesAlright: the flour. I have used a ton of different starchy vegetables to make flours and they’ve all worked out great for pasta. So far, I’ve tried jewel yams, Asian/Oriental yams, plantains, purple sweet potatoes and golden sweet potatoes. Taste-wise, I like the jewel yams the best (plus the pasta was bright orange!) but for looks, the Oriental yam won hands down. The flour ends up being white, hence the pasta is a creamy color and looks more like the “real” stuff. The kids loved the purple sweet potato spaghetti — the pasta was purple — but I personally felt like I was eating play dough. Plantain flour works amazingly well, but it has a pretty earthy taste to it and may not be to everyone’s liking. I’m planning on experimenting with taro root, winter squash and pretty much every starchy thing I can get my hands on when I get back. If anyone has already tried these, please let us know in the comments!

Instructions:

  1. Peel your starchy vegetable of choice.
  2. Slice very thinly with a mandolin slicer or carefully with a knife.
  3. Dehydrate until vegetable is completely dried out. (Try snapping a piece in half, if it’s dried all the way through then it’s done. This step doesn’t take as long as you’d think. Mine was done in less than 2 hours. I also tried this in the oven. Set the oven as low as it will go (170 degrees or less) and occasionally crack the door open to let the moisture escape. Keep an eye on the slices and remove when dried. Using an oven for this is more of an art than a science but it can be done.)
  4. Put the dried vegetable into the dry container of a Vitamix, or a good blender. Blend until the vegetable is a smooth flour.
  5. Use and store as you would any other flour. I keep mine in sealed mason jars.

That is it — that is all. A very simple way to make Paleo flour from your favorite starchy vegetables. You’ll need approximately 140 grams of flour (I like to use a couple different kinds — 70 grams or so of each) for the pasta recipe, so make sure you have enough. Whatever you have left over, you can turn into pancakes for Sunday morning breakfast. :) You’ll also need tapioca flour/starch and finely milled almond flour (if you want — almond is optional) in addition to the flour you’ve made so pick them up this weekend if you don’t already have them!

For those of you in the Austin and Houston areas, I hope to see you at the Primal Transformation Seminars this weekend. Otherwise, I’ll be chatting with you Monday when I return.

Oh — you’ll need one final thing: a nice bottle of red wine.

Can going Paleo give you Celiac disease?

Posted on by
9
No Gravatar

The short answer is no. Going Paleo isn’t going to suddenly give you a disease you never had. However, those that have undiagnosed Celiacs or gluten intolerance (so, lots of you) that consume wheat on a (let’s face it) daily basis may not be aware of the symptoms it’s causing until they remove it. They may have learned to live with nausea, fluid retention, hypoglycemia, panic attacks, arthritis or rumbly tummies, or may not even know those ailments are connected to what they’re eating. They may not even notice much of a difference when the gluten is removed. However, it’s hard to ignore what happens when the gluten is reintroduced after a period of time. Suddenly developing Celiacs or gluten intolerance is a common theme on the Paleo forums, because a lot of people may not have known they were sensitive in the first place.

About three years ago, before I had ever heard the word ‘Paleo,’ I went to see a gastroenterologist because of all the digestive issues I was having. I was certain I had Celiac disease, or at the very least, was gluten sensitive. The doctor was certain I didn’t (yet another example of doctors failing me). They didn’t do any blood tests but they did sign me up for a colonoscopy and endoscopy, which in retrospect doesn’t make any sense  - unless the doctor was trying to fulfill some surgery quota. By the time I had the surgery, I had been gluten free for several months, which was a huge mistake. They didn’t find anything. Three years later, there’s enough information on the Internet for me to find out that colonoscopys can’t diagnose Celiac disease anyway – only an endoscopy can and then only if there’s damage present. Eliminating gluten from my diet before the surgery allowed my body to heal enough so that the doctor didn’t find anything. He diagnosed me with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), which even then I knew to be bullshit. IBS is the catch-all diagnosis when they don’t know what’s wrong with you and can’t be bothered to find out. (I encourage anyone with a diagnosis of “general IBS” to look into it further.)

Enter the Primal diet. It doesn’t allow for wheat, so for two years, I didn’t have any except on rare occasions. My cheats were usually sushi. When I did have wheat, I would have diarrhea for a day or so, then be right back on track. A little bloated, perhaps, but that went away quickly and I really didn’t connect it to what I was eating. I also didn’t connect the occasional bout of fatigue, insomnia, depression or the fact that I bruise like a peach at times either. Who would? I certainly didn’t have symptoms like bittykitty on PaleoHacks:

I had horrible mood swings, intense joint pain, endless hunger, weight gain for no reason, muscles tearing, vomiting. Now that I’ve been off [wheat] for awhile, I will actually vomit/pass blood after consuming gluten, in addition to neurological problems, stomach pains, diarrhea/constipation.

My life has been extra stressful lately. Amongst other things, we’ve lost both of our family pets recently. We have two and a half year old twin boys, who are getting their last molars and on their parent’s last nerve. We’re strapped for cash. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed in my life and my diet has slipped. Ordering a pizza or getting a sub sandwich has become more of a weekly occurrence than a monthly one. And I’ve been feeling more and more tired, more depressed, more overwhelmed, with a litany of gastrointestinal issues I’d rather not discuss. Since I’ve been constantly nauseous, I’ve cut down on the amount I eat so I haven’t gained any weight back, but I instinctively knew something was up.

www.kidsaware.co.uk has some great information on allergen-free diets for kids.

Earlier this week, I went to the bathroom and was horrified to see clay-colored poop in the bowl. (Ok, ok, people, poop is important. If you’re not looking at your poop, you should be. It’s the number one indicator of your overall health and can be the first sign of serious problems going on inside. Get over yourself. Start looking at your poop.) It was abnormal enough that it caught my attention on a primal level. Something was wrong. Google said pale or clay-colored stools can indicate serious problems with the liver and to seek immediate medical attention (yay!). For four days in a row, my poop was clay-colored. I called my doctor and made an appointment. In the meantime, I went to PaleoHacks.com and asked them to hack my poop. I was terrified my liver was shutting down. The answers I got put me at ease but left me with another problem: other people who had experienced the same thing had been diagnosed with Celiac disease. I had been eating an extraordinary amount of wheat (relative to my “normal” Primal diet) lately. It all made sense.

My new doctor took me seriously and ordered all the proper tests this time. She didn’t even bat an eyelash. When I described my symptoms, her first question to me was, “Why on earth did you start eating wheat again?” Stress was my answer. Stress, and laziness. It’s easy to slip when you’re overwhelmed and surrounded by temptation.

Andrew from Evolvify has the following to say:

My assessment of the current barometer for medical research on the effect of gluten on humans is roughly this: In the general population (those not having celiac disease or wheat allergies), gluten either causes, or is strongly correlated to a range of autoimmune and neurological disorders. Further, gluten intolerance can present with any one, or group, of symptoms or disorders with varying degrees of severity. Lastly, it is generally agreed that celiac disease and non-celiac gluten intolerance are underreported and under-diagnosed, though the numbers remain speculative.

For me, on a practical level, the correlations between autoimmune and neurological problems in the scientific literature, my personal experiences with gluten, anecdotal reports from others, and the logical framework of evolutionary biology/paleo diet is convincing enough for me to abstain from gluten.

‘Nuff said. I don’t care what those tests say – I am now hardcore about being gluten free. Let’s see what happens.

Check out a full list of symptoms of Celiac disease and gluten intolerance/sensitivity at www.celiac.com. I’ll do a post about gluten-free dining out next for those of you that need it – what you don’t know about the restaurant industry can make you really, really sick.