Easy Hand Made Trofie Pasta

Trofie is a traditional Italian pasta most often served with pesto sauce.

With just 3 ingredients, and no resting or waiting this also means you could be eating fresh wheat-free pasta in as little as 20 minutes from right now!

Read the research below to learn the science behind each ingredient and why it was selected, or just jump to the recipe!

NOTE: I’m working on making changes to how the science section is handled, as well as the newsletter format and I think you’ll love it! Make sure you’re subscribed for some awesome upcoming improvements!

Recipe Overview

Pair the trofie with one of my suggested pasta sauces 🇮🇹:

The Menu

Gluten-free, salt-free, oil-free! Fight’s disease. Vegan, WFPBnO, healthy whole food ingredients, and backed up by the latest medical and scientific health data research.

Long noodles like fettuccine, pappardelle, tagliatelle, and all the rest are great. But I really wanted a shorter noodle that would be able to work with light or heavy sauces and was still easy to make by hand.

I think Trofie fits this description perfectly and I’m not sure how I ever survived before knowing how to make the quick and easy pasta.

Allergy Friendly – Top 8 Allergy Free

As usual with all the recipes:
no dairy, no eggs, no wheat, no nuts, no tree nuts, no shellfish, no seafood, no soy, no corn, no salt added, no oil added, no sugar added, no coconut.
Using only minimally processed or proven safe foods from scratch.

Have questions or a request to update a recipe for a specific allergy or food restriction? Contact me and I’d love to help!

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Nutrition Facts Table

⭐Rustic Trofie Handrolled Pasta⭐

Quick & Rustic Trofie Handrolled Pasta

Chef Rob

A short noodle for picking up delecate sauces like pesto or a great noodle as an alternative to macaroni and cheese sauce.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Course Comfort Food, Dinner, Lunch, Main Course, Pasta, Side Dish, Snack

Cuisine Chinese, Italian

Servings 1 people

Calories 269 kcal

Equipment

• 1 Spice / Coffee Grinder
• 1 Chopstick (or similar shaped object like a pen/pencil)

Ingredients

  

Pasta Dough

• ½ cup oats
• 2 tbsp chia seeds
• ¼ cup water

Instructions

 

Instructions

• Grind the oats and chia seeds into a fine flower. Add to a bowl then add your wet water.
  
• Using a spoon or your hand start mixing the dough until a ball forms. Knead and work the ball in your hands until it becomes fairly smooth and has an eleastic texture.
  
• Roll your ball into a long rope/snake like tube that is about 1.5cm (0.5 inches) thick.
  
• Cut off pieces that at about as thick as they are long (1.5cm/0.5 inches) and roll them so out with your fingers so they look like Frame H, with tapered ends.
  
• Using a chopstick or similar object angle it so it forms a 45° angle with your little unshaped trofie. With a light pressure, push down and away with the chopstick to form the trofie.

  It may seem difficult at first until you get use to the motion. You might need to use your other hand as a guide or reposition your trofie and chopstick to keep the right angle throughout. Take it slow and speed will come as you get better at it.
  
• When you have made all your tofie pasta simply drop them in a pot of rapidly boiling water until they float–which takes about 30 to 90 seconds. Quickly strain and blanch (soak) them in ice-cold water to increase the resistant starch and bite.

  Toss with your preferred sauce and enjoy!
  

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🧂If you absolutely must add salt then try to add it to taste, and in small amounts and only after tasting it first. The same goes for other “less healthy” additions, but the idea should be to try to limit and eventually remove adding them, over time, when you are ready.

After a few weeks of not eating a SAD diet your tastebuds reset and you’ll notice the natural sodium in foods, check out the great article, and subscribe to, Michael Corthell on Substack.

Tips for Making Perfect Trofie

• The most important thing is to not make the trofie too big. They can be longer but if they become too big they will be doughy in the middle.
• These are rustic pasta shaoes so nobody should expect the shape to be perfect–or even good the first few times you try. Do the best you can and I’m certain you’ll enjoy your pasta even if it’s shaped terribly.

Variations and Customizations

• Double Long | Half Long: try making trofie that is twice the length, or half as long, to add some interesting variety.
• Alkaline/Ramen Pasta: add 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda to the water and let the dough rest before cooking it. This should create noodles with a similar texture to instant ramen/noodles.

I haven’t tried drying out or freezing this recipe yet but I’ll update you if when I or another subscriber figures it out.

Why This Trofie Pasta is Needed:

• There aren’t any WFPB wheat-free handmade “short” noodle recipes online that don’t require a pasta maker machine. Having a “short” noodle for more delicate but rich sauces like pesto or (macaroni and) cheese sauce was a must-have for me.
  
• Storebougt wheat-free and gluten-free pasta, recently, has become extremely expensive–like everything has become–and finding an alternative that costs only pennies for a portion is a dream!
  
• Have you ever tried to take a baking or pasta recipe for multiple people and try to “math” it to work with a single person? Take it from me as I’ve not only seen it, I’ve tried it and it usually it ends in disaster.
  

So this recipe is quick (maybe not the first time due to getting the shape right) and trofie is great at picking up light sauces like pesto, creams, and lighter cheese sauces. It costs around $0.50 to make a portion so 7 days of pasta would be around $3.50!

The Tricks I Used for Trofie Pasta

The real trick with this pasta dough is to blend the chia seeds with the oats so they are evenly distributed. Therefore you have a “just add water” dough that will form very quickly and requires no resting time. I tried doing it with the “chia egg” method and it was difficult to work with and the dough dried out too quickly or became too wet, and needed the right amount of kneading: too much and it would be brittle and break-up in the water, too little and it would just melt in the water or not have any of al dente to the bite of the pasta.

The best way to knead this dough

This dough only needs 30-60 seconds of kneading or so, and it is best done in the hands, not on a table. Pretend like it’s a stress ball and keep squeezing and reshaping it into a ball. The dough should then be ready. Just flour your surface and roll out the dough. Simple.

Why is it different than other pasta recipes?

• I don’t use a pasta machine.
• I don’t use a food processor or high-speed blender
• I only use oat, chia seeds, and water.
• The is zero resting time.
• Extremely cheap.
• Super quick and easy and in 20 minutes you have pasta.
• No oil, no butter, no processed items.
• No kneading, basically.
• Minimal clean-up.
• No wheat or gluten.

Kitchen Hacks & Tips

Here are some hacks for this recipe or the kitchen in general.

1. No knife skills? Try scissors. Cleaned and sanitized scissors are actually quite useful and often used by professional chefs and bakers even for even things like cutting dough.
   
2. Don’t knead this dough on a counter/surface, instead flour your hands and roll and knead it in your hands like it’s a stress ball/doll. This avoids having to add too much extra flour and also uses your body heat to activate the avenin in the dough–avenin is a protein that creates that chewy stretch in oats similar to gluten.
   

Bonus Hack: Try mixing in dry herbs and spices right into your pasta dough! Herbs like oregano, basil, rosemary for pasta is interesting, but also try things like cinnamon, ginger, cloves, tarragon or other spices and then you could add them to sweet sauces like a cocoa powder and date sauce, or sautee them with a bit of water or red wine vinegar then sautee until crispy on the outside and use as topping for desserts.

The Science – Sources

Please tell me how it turned out! Did you: try it, like it, hate it, change it, or do something else unexpected???

If I’ve made any mistakes, or something doesn’t make sense, or if you want more/less details, please let me know in the comments.

Easy Hand Made Trofie Pasta