March 2020 – covid had just begun and I was in full paranoid mood of working from home and not letting anyone in my family go outside without a proper mask. Although my father rebelled against this rule fully by visiting the milk shop, the vegetables shop and God knows which shops with only a handkerchief on his face. 🤓

Some 10 months back, I had gone to Europe on a business trip and subjected my stomach to a full blown dairy attack by having pasta, pizza, cheese, waffles and and all those typical European delicacies. I had also bought some local hand crafted pastas and since I did not understand German, I could not understand the ingredients from which these pasta were made of. The struggle is real when you see colourful pasta in different shapes and you only understand “gluten-free” or “refined flour free” written on the packets.

Or maybe you only spot these phrases. 🙈

Cut to 2020, the expiry date of this particular packet of spaghetti was coming to an end and I gently reminded myself that I spent euros, not rupees on this packet. So the sooner I use it, the better it will be for my soul who will not repent on the extravaganza I did in Europe.

So this particular spaghetti looks in colour like our desi brown bread that has zero whole wheat flour and too much caramel added to attract health-conscious customers. But the spaghetti is actually prepared from whole meal spelt – a grain similar to whole wheat but having a nuttier flavour and is more nutritious. This grain is grounded – bran, germ and endosperm all together and not refined. 

And since this had the tag of healthy, I ended up cooking and eating the whole 500g in one go. 

And I did not stop at cooking 500g in one go, later on I even cooked a kilo of pasta with vegetables and cheese and ate that whole ensemble in one meal. I’ll save the aftermath story for another blog post.

Please do remember that before cooking this, I was not a pro at cooking pasta and especially, whole wheat flour ones.

I think the reason that refined flour or durum wheat flour pastas are popular because of their ease in getting boiled and providing that glossy texture. Whole wheat varieties, if not cooked properly, will have a doughy texture. 

So I started boiling the pasta and went to check the time to cook in the label. Unfortunately it was not there. Local European brands will not have the cooking time, maybe because pasta is a staple there and they inherently know the time. The way we Indians have the “divine knowing” on how much water to add to our chappati and paratha doughs and when they are cooked (or burnt 🤣) by looking at the texture.

So I employed the makeshift method of checking when the pasta is perfectly boiled. I kept cutting small pieces from spaghetti to check the al-Dante status every 2 minutes after the 10 minute boiling window. Thankfully my sister assisted as she had some experience in cooking whole wheat pasta. She also dolled out some choiciest remarks on how my mind goes into a money spending spree when I see pasta without thinking whether I have the capability to cook them. My mother added to the lovely chaos that ensued, as usual.

Anyway, getting back to the cooking part, I sautéed some non-brown vegetables because of aesthetics as we were taking pictures of this pasta for our micro blog on Instagram. But I don’t know what happened to my mind that I added white balsamic vinegar to them and then added pasta. There was no sauce by the way, only sautéed vegetables. 

So we plated the pasta, clicked the picture and then my sister took the first bite. And that was the last bite she ate of that pasta because it was extremely sour. Later on, I learnt that you add soured mediums only when you have a functioning sauce in the pasta dish. And you do not overdo it. 

Since I do not like to waste food, I ate that whole batch of sour and doughy pasta, all 500gm. Even after ensuring that the pasta was boiled, it still tasted doughy. Should have asked my German colleagues on how to make such pastas palatable.

Some people learn their lessons quickly. I am not one of those. I ended up buying a few more packets of whole wheat pasta, not cooking them properly and finishing the whole batch myself. 😅