This beet pasta was great.
How to make:
Wet stuff
6.0 oz raw beets, diced then cooked in microwave (short cooking w/ no water reduces loss of water-soluble and heat-sensitive vitamins)
3.5 oz eggs (2 med)
0.5 tsp salt
1.5 tsp olive oil
Liquified via 5 sec in blender (Vitamix - short blending reduces oxidation loss of vitamins)
Dry stuff
13.5 oz raw beets (1 jumbo beet), sliced, dehydrated (use low or no heat in the dehydrator for 12-18 hours) then blendered to 1.8 oz beet powder (leave the blender lid on until the beet dust settles down)
8.5 oz white flour, which is 2.25 cup
Knead throughly in mixer, to develop maximum gluten and get dough that while a little soft and on the sticky side, forms a dough ball. Dust with flour and wrap in plastic to refrigerate 1/2 hour.
The resulting dough is 62% beets, by starting raw weight!
It is a little harder to work with than standard pasta dough, being stickier, a little less elastic, and a little more grainy. But with a little flour dusting, it rolled through my pasta machine, requiring just a little more care (I couldn’t skip thickness steps like I do with standard pasta dough), and wide fettucine was easy - thin spaghetti might be harder, and not sure if it will extrude well.
The uncooked noodles are dull dark red-brown, but the cooked noodles are brighter and redder. About 3 minutes cooking at a rolling boil in salted water, using a wooden spoon to gently stir out any clumps.
The 62% beet pasta was very well received. It had the tooth and springyness of fresh pasta, just a bit of sweetness but not a notable ”beety” flavor, held sauce well (here, a garlic-parmesan-olive oil quick sauce), and was just yummy.
Shown here with the 36% spinach pasta from round one of the experiments, and a conventional dry pasta. Looks Italian, no?
It’s cool to stuff your face with pasta and have it actually be > 60% vegetables. I think this process would work with any vegetable - spinach, etc.