Guilt-Free Clean Pasta.

“Clean” and “italian” aren’t normally used in the same sentence regarding food, but there are a few ways you can still eat your pasta.

The Noodles

Regular pasta noodles are made with enriched, bleached flour. An upgrade from regular pasta is either whole wheat flour (as long as the first ingredient is WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR and not enriched bleached anything. or brown rice pasta.

You can find Tinkyada pasta at health food stores, Giant Eagle, even Walmart. I think it tastes even more like real pasta than whole wheat pasta, and B loves it. The first time I made it he asked if it was “real” pasta…. you literally can’t tell the difference!

Nutritionally it's debatable, both whole wheat and brown rice are clean, complex carbohydrates, but they've both been processed into pasta. You can read more about this here.

The sauce:

The sauce is tricky because of jarred sauce’s added sugar, salt, soybean oil, additives/preservatives. Making your own sauce (from organic tomatoes and herbs) gets the Best Sauce trophy, but lets be real, how often are we going to squish 50 roma tomatoes down into sauce for a jar of sauce? (Though I have done this!)

Bertolli makes an organic sauce that I was buying for a long time. It’s delicious and organic, but here’s the ingredients:

Organic Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste),Organic Diced Tomatoes In Juice, Organic Soybean Oil,Organic Sugar, Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Organic Onions, Sea Salt, Organic Garlic, Organic Romano Cheese (Organic Cultured Part Skim Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Organic Basil, Organic Black Pepper,Organic Fennel.

Now, I’m one of those people who over-sauces their pasta (I know, I know) so every little bit of soybean oil and sugar counts for me. So, the better option is….

Make your own from canned sauce and paste!

Hunts (surprisingly) makes a NATURAL (meaning completely free of artificial additives and preservatives) canned sauce and paste.

The only preservative it contains is a natural one, citric acid, which is harmless. (Link to the list of preservatives.)

Also, if organic is your thing, Muir Glen Organic makes tomato sauce and paste also.

Tomato Sauce:
1 can tomato paste (small)
2 cans tomato sauce
italian herbs (basil, oregano, black pepper, crushed red pepper flakes)

Do you need cheese?

If you must, the best choice is a freshly grated brick of parmesan. Stay away from the cheese powder in the plastic shaker, it's not even real cheese and it's loaded with fillers.

Viola! Healthy pasta.
You can thank me later.