Pasta salads can be a great healthy snack that can be eaten on the go. But there’s a simple preparation step to increase the dietary fiber content and make a high fiber pasta salad. This can make the meal even healthier and decrease the calorie content. Why not!
Follow this simple strategy to make a high fiber pasta salad.
The strategy is to turn the starch inside the pasta into a type of dietary fiber known as resistant starch. This turns calorific starch into low-calorie resistant starch. The great thing is you can do this with normal white pasta. You don’t have to use brown pasta to get fiber!
To learn more about resistant starch see our previous article on dietary fiber in bananas.
Here’s the strategy:
- Boil your pasta as normal
- Thaw
- The starch within your pasta will have started to gelatinise, making it partially resistant.
- If you then freeze your pasta and thaw it, it will retrograde further making it even more resistant.
- You can repeat this numerous times and make the starch in the pasta more and more resistant (Just be careful not to leave it out too long, to avoid any contamination issues. Also, whatever you do don’t heat the pasta again, that’ll re-solubilise the starch in the pasta.)
- Finally, add the sauce or veggies or whatever else you want to add to the mix and enjoy.
If you’re interested, there’s an easy experiment you can perform with cornstarch in solution to see the process of making resistant starch.
If you add corn starch to water and then bring to the boil the cornstarch will dissolve completely into solution. This is the form of starch that is digestible by enzymes in your gut. But if you freeze and thaw the starch solution up to 5 times the starch will begin aggregating into insoluble white clumps. These clumps are a resistant starch.