I finally got around to making spaghetti and meatballs with the Jovial gluten-free pasta I bought a few weeks ago.
Now, let me start with the Jovial part of this story. I've been cooking the Chinese rice noodles I bought in bulk last month and they've been good. They won't be confused for any kind of real pasta anytime soon, but they are still good.
The Jovial pasta is meant to be an actual replacement for the familiar pasta types. In this case, spaghetti. But, of course, it isn't a familiar pasta type so it has to be cooked differently. I read the box and googled the best way to do it and I'm going to share that here right now.
The key with these not-pasta pastas is that you need to boil them in incredibly salty water. The directions even say 2 tablespoons of salt for the required amount of water but I can tell you that 1/4 cup is closer to the mark for the 4 - 6 quarts necessary!
Why so salty? Because the thing they use to hold the rice flour together in place of gluten is starch, and there is SO much starch in these noodles that if you used it on your pants you'd never be able to sit down again. And you'll figure this out pretty quick because, with that much starch, the noodles are going to want to not only stick together but stick to literally everything else they touch. The directions say to stir constantly, but what they don't say is that you'll be using your tongs to pull out branches of noodles that have glued themselves together and you will have to pick it apart, strand by strand, like some kind of superheated diabolical string cheese!
Definitely cook your spaghetti sauce and meatballs FIRST, because you'll need to devote so much time to keeping the noodles apart, you'll feel like a teacher in a preschool.
The next thing you have to know about these noodles is that there's only about 30 seconds between the time they're "done" and when they turn into rubber where you can lock them in at the right consistency. This means, you turn off the heat, rush the pot to the colander and dump out your noodles, then, in the next five seconds, return the noodles to the pot and add the sauce. You absolutely cannot let the noodles spend any time at all languishing in the colander while you fanny around doing other things. And you can't just put them in a bowl by themselves and let people assemble their plate "to their liking". Nope! You throw the pasta and the sauce - a LOT of sauce - together and let the two mingle and marry so that the noodles stay noodle-like and bond to the sauce.
Then you can serve it!
The meatballs were a simple mix I threw together using things I had to use up. Ground beef, obviously, Italian breadcrumbs, two eggs, a handful of diced onion, Italian seasonings, two tablespoons of minced garlic, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, a quarter cup of sour cream, a bunch of parmesan cheese, and a tablespoon of A1 steak sauce. This was done mostly just because I could, because I thought it would help boost the flavor, and it did. The mixture was still too dry so I threw in a few squirts of Italian salad dressing to loosen it up and this worked really well. The dressing was Italian with parmesan cheese in it too, so it really had a great flavor. I cooked the meatballs in the airfryer first then added them to the sauce.
I also fried up a few Italian sausages that I picked up at the specialty shop but these were not so great so I ended up throwing them out. They had a weird grainy texture to them and...I think they might have had some type of cheese in them. I don't know because they weren't labeled as anything other than: "Italian sausage".
I served with garlic bread.
The meal was really good. It was nice to be able to enjoy noodles again. Definitely make sure to follow all the instructions for the gluten-free noodles.