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We all love a comforting bowl of pasta on a cool day, but for whatever reason, sometimes you just don’t want to eat the noodles. Never fear, there are tons of alternatives that will not only satisfy your pasta craving, but may even add something more interesting to your traditional dishes. Check them out below and if you can think of another option, don’t forget to let us know in the comments below!
1. Spaghetti Squash
Possibly one of the most popular options to substitute traditional pasta. If you’ve ever cooked a spaghetti squash, you’ll notice the stringy nature of the squash naturally. You can play off this buy cooking the spaghetti squash in the oven, simply lifting out the innards with a fork and sauteing it quickly in a pan with whatever your favorite pasta sauce entails.
2. Sweet Potatoes
Another popular alternative that’s on the rise are sweet potato noodles, yeah, you read that right. The starchy quality and substantial meaty quality lends itself quite well to pasta. Using a peeler or a spiral tool, you can shave sweet potatoes into fettuccine like noodles. You simply then blanch them or saute them and add your favorite sauce (pesto or cream sauces tend to work better with sweet potato noodles than tomato based sauces).
3. Zucchini
Zucchini, like Spaghetti Squash has a very mild flavor, lending it to almost any sauce you want to make it a part of. The one thing with choosing zucchini as an alternative is the possibility of overcooking. It takes very little time to cook and even less to overcook, so you need to be careful, adding it into your sauce only once you’re almost ready to serve. To create the pasta like springs you can use a peeler or a spiral tool. It also makes a fantastic alternative to lasagna noodles.
4. Bean or Lentil Pasta
If you’re not in the market to make your pasta from vegetables, another amazing alternative is using a bean or lentil pasta. These are made from ground beans or lentils and while they may have a slightly bean-y taste to them, they’re a wonderful, protein rich alternative that come in almost any shape. To make bean pastas from scratch simply buy bean flours or grind dry beans into a fine flour and make your favorite homemade noodle recipe from there.
5. Cabbage
Cabbage is another vegetable that’s almost crying to become a noodle alternative. If you slice the cabbage across the leaves you’ll end up with curly little whirls that resemble a noodle. To cut down on the cabbage flavor you can simply blanch them quickly. They make a great choice when you’re making a tomato based pasta creation since cabbage and tomatoes are always a perfect pair.
