FreeFrom all’Italiana

I have indeed been trying to persuade Anna to write a book about freefrom Italian cookery for years. So I am really delighted that she finally tried some of the very exciting gluten-free pastas now on the market – and that she actually liked them!

However, this book is not just about gluten-free, but also about the wider territory of freefrom. Freefrom lactose and milk products, yes, but also free from many others of those 14 major food allergens that need to be highlighted on all food products. We have only flagged the recipes
as being free from gluten, milk or lactose, but in fact many of the recipes are also free of soya, egg, nuts, peanuts,
sesame and mustard.

In fact, much Italian food is naturally freefrom. Polenta, made from corn or maize, and rice are
as common in northern Italy as pasta; olive oil is used as often as butter as a cooking medium; while meat and fish dishes are usually simply prepared with herbs and vegetables, without the need for thickeners or cream. Nonetheless, pasta does remain the backbone of Italian cuisine outside Italy, so the development of good alternative, non-wheat-based pastas was crucial, if Freefrom all’Italiana was ever really to take off.

Gluten-free pasta

You can now buy pasta made from a huge range of gluten-free ingredients: corn, rice, quinoa, buckwheat, soya beans, chickpeas, black beans, low-calorie konjac and even seaweed – although strictly speaking you do not make seaweed pasta at all, you just harvest it!

Some of these – especially corn and rice-based pasta – come very close to the texture and flavour of a durum wheat pasta; although of course, they will never taste exactly the same because the base ingredients are different. For some of the dishes in the book (such as the
fennel and anchovy sauce on page 18 ), that is what you need: a relatively mild, smooth pasta that will not overpower the delicate flavour of the sauce.

Others – the pulse-based pasta, for example – can be coarser in texture and stronger in flavour, but that does not at all invalidate them as a base for a sauce. It just means that you have to devise different sauces that suit them, which is exactly what Anna has done.

Some, such as the konjac or seaweed, bear very little resemblance to classic pasta at all – they have much chewier and ‘nyunkier’ textures – but still make an excellent and unusual base for
the right sauce.