I LOVE heirloom tomatoes and when they are in season I want to eat them every day. I made this delicious vegan pasta dish using Einkorn fusilli which is one of the oldest forms of cultivated wheat.
What I find most interesting about Einkorn is that this ancient wheat does contain gluten, but is different from modern wheat in that it contains only 14 chromosomes as opposed to 42 chromosomes. Also, Einkorn is packed with protein at 9g per serving which is great to get more plant-based protein.
Because Einkorn has a different gluten structure, I wanted to see how Einkorn affected me, and I'll explain a little later on what I experienced.
But first, this is how I made my pasta sauce. It's so simple!
Ingredients (2 servings):
- One large heirloom tomato
- 1/2 red onion sliced
- 5 whole cloves of garlic (add more if you like)
- Fresh thyme
- Fresh chopped basil
- Sea salt
- Olive Oil
- 2 cups organic pasta sauce from a jar. (Use your favorite brand. For mine, I used Newman's Own Organic Marinara.)
- 1 cup cooked Jovial brand Einkorn Organic Whole Wheat Fusilli
- (optional) Shaved Daiya Garlic Jalapeno Havarti for topping
With heirlooms, it's pretty easy to find one large tomato that is about the size of 2-3 small ones. For 25 minutes at 400 degrees, I roasted in the oven one large yellow orange heirloom tomato with red onion, cloves of garlic, and fresh thyme massaged in olive oil and two pinches of sea salt.
Note: I put the garlic on top of the tomatoes because if the garlic is on the pan it can cook too much and get hard.
When the tomato was done roasting, it was interesting to see how the tomato juices blended with the olive oil, sea salt and thyme to create a very tasty juice for the sauce.
When the tomatoes were done roasting, I let them cool down a bit and sliced them into smaller pieces for the sauce. I tossed the tomato chunks into a medium saute pan with some chooped basil and added the marinara sauce and cooked on medium for about 5 minutes so all the flavors could bled together.
Pour sauce on the cooked Einkorn Fusilli, and top with with some shaved Daiya Garlic Jalapeno Havarti and you have a most amazing pasta dish!
After I was done eating my pasta, besides feeling happy, I noticed that I did not get that heavy feeling I normally experience when I eat regular organic whole wheat. The taste and texture of the Einkorn is very close in nature to the Trader Joe's Gluten-free Brown Rice pastas I eat often but was a little tougher like regular whole wheat, and didn't create a gooey mess in the pot like all gluten-free pastas tend to do when boiling.
I really liked the Einkorn pasta! In the bulk foods section at Whole Foods saw Einkorn wheat berries which I will try next time. Have you tried Einkorn wheat pastas? If so, what did you experience?
