i’ve been experimenting with how much vegetable I can get into pasta.
My first effort, shown here, is
6 oz raw veg (spinach, cauliflower, or chard), cooked and drained, into blender with
2 med eggs, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 1/2 tsp olive oil, and blended to liquid, then into mixer, adding
1 3/4 to 2 cups all purpose white flour, just as much as needed to make a dough after 20 min of kneading to develop lots of gluten, then rolled and cut into flat noodles using a manual pasta maker
I paired this with a beef stroganoff
and the results were excellent. Shown are the spinach and cauliflower pastas, the chard pasta was dark green and perhaps the best. I had some friends who dropped by as testers, and they loved it.
Using the initial (raw) weights, this pasta is about 36% veg, 18% egg, 46% flour. Not exactly like eating vegetables instead of flour, but partway there.
My next effort is to microwave veg (retains the most vitamins and minerals of any cooking method), dehydrate, grind to powder, and sub the resulting dry veg for some part of the flour in the above recipe. Because the veg will lose so much water weight in dehydration, the result should be (using initial raw weights) over 50% veg - potentially well over.
I haven’t yet calculated the nutritional content of the resulting pasta, but am hopeful of creating a pasta that is not too far from eating veggies, while being as tasty as “normal” pasta.
There are “vegetable flours” that hippies use as no-wheat no-gluten substitutes for wheat flour. I am dubious about a 1 for 1 substitution (without gluten, how can the pasta feel right?), and am not sure if the commercial manufacturing process is optimized to retain nutrients (I’m microwaving because many vitamins are water soluble and dehydrating with minimal heat, since some vitamins are heat-sensitive, do the factories take the same care?), but I suppose one could simply buy that stuff and mix it with wheat flour.