7 April 2016

Pro pasta- nutrition from crickets (by @NLi10)

I love pasta. Fairly recently however I found out that the nutritional value of pasta is practically zero! Sure - it can give you calories, but as we now understand on the Evidence Based Diet it's all about nutrients per calorie. Standard pasta really doesn't work in that - but used skilfully with a few other things for people who need those extra calories like me it can be a side to the main part of the meal.

That's where Pro Pasta - a kind of protein pasta comes in. Eventually I'll do a big feature on these but for now we've seen the seaweed (which I personally found too fishy), and the edamame bean tagliatelle which is great.

This one? It's got crickets in it.


Now granted that sounds very off-putting but stick with me - crickets (well cricket flour) is showing up in quite a few surprising places. Like whey used to be added to everything in the sports aisle I'm sure crickets will get there. We like to be ahead of the curve.


The first thing to notice is that this isn't standard wheat pasta - I almost missed this on first glance and couldn't work out why the texture was odd yet familiar.  There is flour in here too but it's cassava so coeliacs are fine, but it's a lot more similar to Thai noodles, but with brown rice instead of white. Instantly I'm interested, they haven't just taken the first crazy thing they found to market and run with it, there is a lot of love going on here. I'm guessing the brown is to hide the crickets. It also explains why my package had to come from Thailand (and took so long - it landed in all the Easter reviews so was delayed again).


It said to use a smaller portion than usual, so I did. I didn't weigh it but I'd say I got it right enough.

On cooking it looses a lot of its colour (again - like rice noodles) but that's fine. I bravely tried it with a little sprinkle of the spice grinder, and Herta sausages left over from the seaweed recipie. And...


...it was fine! It was chewier than I'd anticipated which caused me to re read the bag and find out it had rice in it too. The flavour wasn't crickety and if you used a sauce then you'd probably not even notice that you'd changed the pasta.

I don't think it's for everyone as there is a psychological barrier, but if well cooked and in a recipie then if you like rice noodles and pasta then you'll like this. I'm really not a fan of the texture of whole meal pasta and so definitely prefer this. My veggie partner won't eat crickets (are they meat? Discuss!) so this is for solo meals only, but I'm sure I'll get more of this.

A victory for the crickets!



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