Tinned spaghetti for all

The range of foods now readily available for people with special dietary requirements really is quite extraordinary. My grandma suffered from incredibly restricting allergies in her later years, including severe intolerance to wheat and dairy, but during that time (in the 90s and early 2000s), the availability of products suitable for her diet was extremely limited, requiring a visit to either a specialist health-food shop, or the very largest of the supermarkets out of town.

These days, by contrast, you can expect to be able to pick up a gluten-free loaf or bag of pasta, a carton of oat, soya, rice or almond milk, a dairy-free chocolate bar and all sorts else at your local corner shop, Tesco Express or similar, and the range of products seems to be ever expanding. I can't say however that I have seen very many tinned goods in this category, so when I spotted this tin of spaghetti in tomato sauce a while back, made by an Australian company called Orgran, I was intrigued as to what it would be like.

The label says it is gluten free, wheat free, soy free, dairy free, egg free, yeast free, vegan AND low fat. Which immediately made me wonder just what was actually in it.

The ingredients list reveals that the spaghetti itself is made of stone-milled rice, yellow split peas and monoglyceride (the latter, Wikipedia informs me, is often added to foods as an emulisfier). A notable absence from the ingredients list was sugar, though it did include "pear juice sweetener" to do the same job. Interesting that the label didn't say the product was sugar-free too, or free of refined sugars, but maybe pear juice sweetener counts as the latter? I don't really know enough about such things.

If the pasta sounded a little strange from the ingredients, it certainly looked it. Opening the tin revealed what looked like rather dense rods of carbohydrate, rather than soft strands of spaghetti as the picture on the label seemed to show. I tried one straight from the tin and it had a very toothsome texture which reminded me of very al dente wholemeal pasta, or brown rice. I didn't pick up a particular hint of pea at all. The 'sauce' surrounding the pasta was practically solid at room temperature, which was also a little odd.

The label suggested it would be "ideal as a meal or in between snack". Being only a 220g tin, I didn't feel it would make a meal on its own, and so needed something to go with it to make it more substantial. I always think any type of tinned thing in tomato sauce (be that beans, pasta shapes or anything else) goes well on toast, so went down that route. I suppose I should really have gone for a gluten-free loaf to continue the theme - but instead I went in completely the opposite direction. Somewhat facetiously, my toast was a brioche bun, and hence contained gluten, wheat, dairy, egg and yeast. It certainly wasn't vegan and I highly doubt you could claim it was low fat either. Oh well.

On heating, the sauce quickly became quite runny - more so than these tinned pasta sauces usually are, even though it does have modified maize starch as a thickener. They can often be overly sweet too; pleasingly, this wasn't the case here (thank you, pear juice sweetener), but there didn't seem to be a huge amount of tomato flavour to replace it. I won't be as cheeky as to say that in addition to being gluten free, diary free and so on it was "taste free" too, but it was a little underwhelming. The spaghetti had softened very slightly, but was still rather toothsome.

I can't say therefore that this is a particularly good or close substitute for standard tinned spaghetti - the taste and texture are miles off - but obviously I'm in the fortunate position of not having the allergies and intolerances to be needing a product like this. For those that do, it would do the job well enough, and it must be good to see more and more alternative versions of foods that they would like to eat, but can't, appearing on the supermarket shelves. Hopefully this both makes life a bit easier, and reduces the feeling of missing out on one of life's great joys (eating in general, I mean, not just tinned pasta.)