Jessica Block
Sometimes you want pasta, but you also want fiber, so you eat whole wheat pasta. Sometimes you want pasta, but you also want protein, so you eat protein pasta. And sometimes, you want pasta and you want protein and you don’t consume gluten—and that’s where the best chickpea pasta comes in. We searched high and low to find all the chickpea pastas people claim to love to find out once and for all which one is the princess of the peas.
What we were looking for in the best chickpea pasta
“But Jess, what fine attributes doth a good chickpea pasta make?” I hear you cry. Alright, calm down Lord Garbanzo, I’ll tell you. We looked for a few different things. Firstly, did the chickpea pasta in question have the texture of pasta? The best chickpea pastas are not too gritty, not too mushy, and not too brittle. Secondly, did it taste like pasta? The best chickpea pastas have minimal unpleasant or off flavors. It may be healthy, but it doesn’t have to taste that way. And lastly, the best chickpea pasta looks like pasta. We know that seems like a low bar, but trust us, we’ve been in the chickpea trenches, and it’s not all pasta-shaped butterflies and rainbows down there.
So without further ado, here are the best chickpea pastas you can buy at the store.
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- Chickapea Spaghetti
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This spaghetti is a tad peppery and a skootch cardboardy on its own, and it definitely has a bit of a gritty chew to it. That said, once this was slathered in tomato sauce, it was just a perfectly tasty al dente spaghetti, and most all the non-pasta-like flavors were immediately masked. The texture is better than the other spaghetti on this list, but the flavor isn’t quite as good. When it comes to the best chickpea spaghetti, sometimes it just comes down to preference.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Banza Spaghetti
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I just had an epiphany while writing this: Is Banza called Banza because of GarBANZO beans? If so, why are they not called Banzo? Did everyone else notice this ages ago, and I’m just slow? What other food brands have names that are the thing they are selling and nobody told me? I digress. Of all the chickpea spaghetti we tried, this was the best chickpea spaghetti. It has a good, savory taste, and an interesting texture that’s simultaneously stiffer than regular spaghetti but also less stretchy and a bit more brittle. It does have a slightly nutty taste, but we didn’t really mind it—and the sauce all but got rid of it.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Chickapea Organic Spirals
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Ah yes, Chickapea “organic spirals”—or rotini, if you’re normal. This chickpea pasta has a nutty and cheesy flavor that is a bit different and notably less peppery than its counterpart, the Chickapea Spaghetti. Some would call that an “off” flavor, but I gotta say, I kind of…liked it? It has a fantastic toothsome (wow, look at me waxing poetic and whippin’ out the word “toothsome”) al dente pasta texture, and the color is close to regular pasta too (some of the chickpea pastas were very pale yellow and others were a dark brown, whole-wheaty hue). I found these rotini addicting and savory, and I kept snacking on them more than any others on this list. That said, even I can admit the ones further down the list have a lot less non-pasta flavor going for them.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Banza Chickpea Rotini
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I won’t lie, I’m still reeling from the Banza/garbanzo discovery and am finding it hard to focus. That said, Banza Rotini tastes like chickpea/lentil chips. Whether you have had them from Trader Joe’s or elsewhere, that specific, nutty, savory, slightly cardboardy funk is strong with Banza. Maybe stronger than any other brand on this list, but that is not really an “off-tasting” flavor; it’s just different from wheat pasta. That said, if you like that taste, you will not mind this at all, plus with sauce, the taste absolutely disappears, and all you will taste is sauce. That leaves texture. This one is a bit less al dente than the Chickapea offerings and instead has a softer bite, but hey. Maybe you are more of an Al Softpasta and less of an Al Dente, and I’m sure Alan Dente and his famiglia will forgive you for that eventually.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Barilla Chickpea Rotini
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This is the best chickpea rotini we tried in our chickpea pasta taste test. They looked like normal rotini (albeit more like whole wheat pasta in color), and the little bit of off flavor they possess is much more subtle than any of the brands we have mentioned so far. That said, the hint of non-pasta flavor that we detected was, and hear us out, like those peanuts in the shell at a ball game. Rest assured, even though they have a hint of that flavor, these do not contain any peanuts. In fact, the literal ONLY ingredient in these is chickpea flour. And that is pretty darn neat.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Taste Republic Gluten Free Chickpea Linguini
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Y’all, if you told me this was regular ol’ wheat pasta, I would believe you. This fresh pasta, which requires refrigeration, has the best texture of the entire bunch. Alan Dente would be proud (even though they spell it like “Linguini” on the packaging, which I thought was wrong but is, according to Gemini, fine in informal contexts. So I guess as long as this pasta keeps it casual, we are good to go). But I digress. Not only is the texture great, the flavor is great too, with only the faintest whisper of off flavor in the aftertaste, so faint in fact that we couldn’t even really put a finger on what that taste was. And with sauce? Forget it, y’all. This one just tastes like real and perfectly fine pasta. The one downside is that it is refrigerated, not dried, so it is a little more perishable than dry pasta. That said, it has the right chew, it’s not too brittle or gritty, it’s very slurpable (if I do say so myself), has very little off flavor, cooks up in half the time because it is fresh, and looks like normal pasta. You could say the best chickpea pasta is an impastar.
Credit: Liv Averett / Taste Republic
Best Texture Spaghetti
Best Chickpea Spaghetti
Most Interesting Flavor
Best Soft Pasta
Best Chickpea Rotini
Best of the Best
Other chickpea pastas we tried: Whole Goods Gluten Free Chickpea Shells
Matt Crowley
Danny Palumbo
Justine Sterling
Gwynedd Stuart
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!