Gluten-Free Pasta Dough: What's Different and How to Get It Right

If you or someone you're cooking for needs to remove gluten from their diet, you've probably already got a good sense of the ingredients involved. Gluten is the protein in wheat responsible for pasta dough's chewy, flexible texture — it's also the reason we rest pasta dough, since resting lets gluten strands develop. Take gluten out of the equation, and you need a few adjustments to get a workable dough. Here's what changes, and how to handle it.

Ingredients

• Your preferred gluten-free flour blend (often a mix of white rice flour, potato starch, millet flour, or cassava flour — no two blends behave quite the same, so expect some flexibility in your results)

• Xanthan gum (check your flour blend first — many already include it, in which case reduce or skip this)

• Eggs (or water, for an eggless version)

• A glug of olive oil and a pinch of salt (helps elasticity and flavor)

Tools

• Food processor

• Large wooden working board

• Dough scraper

• Pasta machine

• Brass cutter or sharp kitchen knife

• Rolling pin

A note on gluten-free flour

There are countless gluten-free flour blends out there, and since no two are exactly the same, you may need to adjust quantities slightly for the specific blend you're using. Xanthan gum is the texturizer that most closely imitates gluten's binding properties — check your flour's ingredient list before adding more, since many blends already include some.

Mix the dough

You can make gluten-free dough using the same scraper or bowl method as regular pasta dough, but gluten-free flour tends to incorporate liquid better with a bit of mechanical help. Add all your weighed ingredients to a food processor and pulse at high speed for around 10 seconds — you should see the mixture come together into a dough ball quickly. Turn it out onto your working board and knead for 5 minutes.

Adjust as you go

If the dough still feels very sticky after kneading, that's your cue to add a little more gluten-free flour — a tablespoon or two at a time, gradually, until it's easier to knead without becoming too dry. This will vary depending on your specific flour blend, so don't worry if you need more or less than expected. Cover and let it rest for about 10 minutes, then knead for another 5 minutes, then rest again, covered, for 30 minutes.

If you're making hand-shaped pasta

You can shape straight away once the dough has rested — gnocchi sardi, spizzulus, folie d'ulivo, and other hand-shaped pastas all work well with gluten-free dough as-is.

If you're making filled pasta or long strands: sheet with extra care

This is the step that makes or breaks gluten-free dough. Feed it through a pasta machine the way you would regular dough, and you'll likely find it turns crumbly and difficult to work with. A more deliberate sheeting process gets much better results:

Quarter your dough, keeping the rest covered. Flatten the first quarter with your palm, then continue with a rolling pin — you'll spend more time here than with regular dough, since this step is what prepares the more delicate gluten-free dough for the machine. Once it's thinner than your pinky finger, trim the sides with a brass cutter or sharp knife to create a neat rectangle (add any trimmings back into your remaining dough). Neat edges here mean more even sheets later, since gluten-free dough can't be folded and adjusted as flexibly as regular dough once it's in the machine.

Lightly dust your rectangle with gluten-free flour, then feed it through the pasta machine's widest setting. Fold it neatly in half, dust again, flatten with the rolling pin, and feed it through the same setting again. Repeat this two more times. Then feed it through settings 2, 3, and 4, twice at each setting, without folding. Fold it twice more so you have 3 layers, and trim off any crumbling edges. Starting back at setting 2, feed it through twice at each setting until you reach your desired thickness.

It's a lot more repetition than regular dough needs, but it's exactly this gentle, repeated stretching — combined with the xanthan gum — that builds in the elasticity gluten would normally provide.

What you can make with it

Once sheeted this way, gluten-free dough is workable enough for filled pasta or long strands like fettuccine and pappardelle, not just hand-shaped pieces. It takes a bit more patience than working with a standard dough, but the technique holds up well once you've done it a couple of times.

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