I have to admit I’ve seen a lot of goofy things at Trader Joe’s over the years. I can’t count the number of products that come and go without hardly a notice!
Finally, after passing it on the shelf one too many times (it’s my job to jump on these things and I was neglecting my duties) I bought the spaghetti version. We eat a fair amount of pasta at our house and Becky is a bit of a purest when it comes to pasta and she would not even put one strand of this in her mouth when I made it. I am the adventurous eater, but really Becky? You can’t even put one piece of corn pasta in your mouth and give me some feedback? There was no convincing her, so I had to carry on alone in this taste test…
So I’m looking through the pasta section a few weeks ago and I started seeing this Corn Pasta and it was marked gluten free. Here we go again, another product that will come and go. Here today, gone next week. But as the weeks went on, I saw this selling pretty briskly and they have expanded the pasta line to include a few different styles, including penne.
I put the pasta on a cutting board (above) next to some of their organic, bronze extruded wheat pasta and you can see the darker yellow color, but other than that it looked exactly the same. The ingredients are simple, corn flour! This is obviously targeting the Gluten Free crowd. I don’t want to wage into the debate over whether gluten is good or bad for you unless you have something like Celiac disease. A family friend has it and it’s a constant battle finding gluten free products and he is quite pleased with the many offerings from Trader Joe’s!
Instructions are simple, 8 minutes in boiling water and then serve. I felt it needed a bit more than 8 minutes to cook through. I drained it and served my world famous spaghetti sauce on top! To be honest, most pasta doesn’t have a ton of flavor and I thought this might be a little cornier (is that a word?) than the wheat pasta, but I really couldn’t taste much of a difference. There was a slight difference in texture. I found the corn pasta just a bit more gummy than the wheat pasta. Not that it was off putting or anything, just a slight difference and it wasn’t from being overcooked, it was al dente.
I really couldn’t tell much difference between the wheat and corn pastas. I have no reason to buy corn pasta in the future, but for those of you that don’t want to buy wheat pasta and are going gluten free, this is the product for you!
I’m going to give it 8 Bells!
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