November 02, 2026

Filled Pasta

Making fresh pasta for Season Six was a really exciting prospect for me, especially since I’d be able to build some skill making it gluten free. Even though it’s November when I’m posting this, I’d actually started exploring this back in April.

Gluten Free Fresh Pasta

I began by reading every recipe and watching every YouTube video about gluten free pasta making that I could find. If you’ve ever looked into this, you might know that there’s a TON of variation in what people use for the gluten free flour mix they buy or create for it. What I set out to find was a recipe that has a combination of both flavor and dough workability – that is, delicious yet easy to roll to a relatively thin setting. I found 9 different blends for pasta flour, and I wanted to try them all.

Over the next few months I would try a new dough recipe every so often, keeping some notes on what we thought about each. Along the way I think I got pretty good at making the dough and using the Atlas 150 that I bought for this project. Here are the various ones I tried:

  • My baseline was a straight up substitution in the Good Eats recipe using King Arthur Measure for Measure Gluten Free Flour, which is universally not recommended. I confirmed this was no good – it came out very doughy and chewy.
  • The Loopy Whisk blend, which was flavorful but hard to work
  • Babish’s method, which was good but a little difficult to work
  • Let Them Eat Gluten Free Cake’s blend and method was really easy to work, but a little bland flavor-wise
  • Gluten Free on a Shoestring uses Better Batter. I needed to add more water and oil but then it was very workable. The flavor was OK.
  • Impulsive Culinarian’s blend using corn flour and sweet rice flour was probably the best flavor-wise but hard to work.
  • Wendy Wark’s Blend is a popular GF all-purpose. It contains corn starch and super fine rice flour, two of the ingredients in some of the better performing recipes. The dough turned out very workable, with good flavor.

A couple others I found but didn’t get around to trying:

There’s not a perfect answer here – so far I have not found the one “this is the way” flour blend that gives the best workability and flavor. But that’s not to say they aren’t good! They’re mostly all very passable and at the end of the day we have GF fresh pasta, so what’s not to love?

I ultimately decided to use the Wendy Wark blend, for two reasons. First, it’s a high-quality, pre-made blend so you don’t have to fuss with making it yourself from individual ingredients. That saves times and money. The other pre-made blend I tried was Better Batter, and Wendy’s blend beat it.

A close runner up is the Let Them Eat Gluten Free Cake blend. It contains whey protein isolate, which is probably what put it over the top from the others. However, it was a bit bland tasting, though that could probably be fixed by adding a little more salt (though the recipe has a lot to begin with). Since it’s a custom blend, this didn’t win over the Wendy Wark version.

Ravioli

Once I had my choice settled, I picked Ravioli as my starting point. The first step was to make the dough and get it resting. I collected the very simple ingredients list.

pasta dough ingredients

Notice that for this I’m using 3 eggs, where Alton uses 2. Gluten free dough needs a bit more moisture, so the extra eggs fills the gap. I measured out 200g of the flour blend into a bowl, then made a well for the three eggs.

a well with eggs

I opted for this over the food processor because it’s just less mess to clean up later. Also, I do it in a bowl rather than the counter because GF flour is so fine I found it’s easier to control when it’s contained in a bowl. I then used a fork to beat the eggs and incorporate the flour a little at a time. It eventually turns into something that looks like it’ll never come together, because there seems to be no moisture left.

almost dough

That’s the point where I turn it out on the counter and just keep working it. Sometimes at this point it’s really sticky, so I wet my hands just a little to help me work it. If you just keep on working the flour in, turning it, folding it on itself, and repeating, I promise you end up with a ball of dough that has magically come together.

ball of dough

For gluten free specifically, at this point you want to wrap the ball in some plastic wrap and let it sit for at least 30 minutes. This will give the flour the time it needs to hydrate, which will make it workable. This is also the perfect time to prepare the filling. in the show, Alton uses some of his meatloaf recipe as the filling, but only a quarter of it. Rather than reduce the recipe by three quarters, I just decided to make an entire meatloaf, reserve a quarter for filling, and cook the rest for dinner. We’ve already made meatloaf back in Season Two, so I won’t go over that again here. Once I had the mix, I split off a quarter of it and prepared the additions to turn it into ravioli filling.

meatloaf filling

By that point the dough was well rested so I got out my pasta machine and got set up for ravioli making.

pasta making station

The process is pretty straightforward. First I split the dough into quarters, and rolled it out as thin as I could. Since GF dough breaks easily, around setting 2 I cut the sheet in half. I then rolled each out two more levels, stopping at level 4. In the past I’ve tried going thinner but the GF dough will just tear at that point. I laid out the two strips next to each other and plopped half a teaspoon of filling across each.

dough sheets with filling

Then I put on the egg wash, folded them over, cut each individually, and crimp the edges to the best of my ability. It’s a lot of work, and the first few I did were ugly as sin and barely workable. But by the time I was done with the last quarter of the dough I had a good rhythm and process down, and even though they look a bit rustic I think they turned out alright.

meat raviolis

This was a sample of some of the better looking ones. The next step was to cook them. Since I made so many I did it in batches.

cooking raviolis

It took about 4 minutes for them to cook through and float to the top. Once both batches were done, I heated up my cast iron pan with some butter and tossed in the cooked raviolis. A little into cooking I threw in some cut up sage.

finished ravioli

I did this in batches, too. Finally when everything was done it was time to plate, and shave some parmesan on top.

plated raviolis with parm

The raviolis were delicious, except they needed a sprinkle of kosher salt on top, which was wild to me because of how much salt is already in the recipe. But this tracks with other tries – it seems fresh pasta just needs it. Anyway, we really enjoyed them and the extra step of frying them in butter makes them extra special. As much as we liked them, though, I can’t see myself doing this much more in the future – it’s just so labor intensive that it would take a lot to get me to do this again. Oh, and the raviolis paired really well with the meatloaf!

Tortellini

Since I was already in pasta making mode, I figured why not keep going and make Tortellini for Sunday’s dinner. It began exactly like the ravioli did, by making a ball of pasta dough. I won’t go back over it here, but it was the same idea. While the dough rested, I got all the filling ingredients together.

tortellini filling ingredients

After mixing them together I was left with a bowl of filling, which I put in the fridge to firm up until the dough was ready.

filling

When the dough was ready I once again set up my pasta making station.

tortellini making station

From there, it was a slow, five step process. First, I’d roll out as many sheets as I could to about a 4 setting on the Atlas.

pasta sheets

Then I used a 2” biscuit cutter to make rounds.

pasta rounds

After that I put a 1/4 tsp dollop of filling in the middles of each round.

filling on the rounds

Then I went back and put egg wash on one side and folded them into little dumplings.

dumplings

Finally, I folded each dumpling and crimped th ends together to make tortellinis.

tortellinis

As you can see, the first few were pretty rough (upper left) but as I got into a flow they got better and better. The trouble was this – as I made each I put them on a parchment lined sheet pan. However, when I went to cook them, half of them stuck to the parchment and tore when I tried to pick them up to put them into the boiling water. Thw was really discouraging, because the process to make these was slow and pain-staking. I made a first batch out of the ones that didn’t tear by boiling them for about 4 minutes. I then put them in a bowl with some butter, shaved parmesan, and a little parsley.

finished tortellini

I didn’t make enough of them for a full meal, so we ate them as a little before-dinner snack. They were quite delicious! We loved the flavor of the filling, and the texture of the GF fresh pasta. Trouble is that it’s such a pain to make that I don’t really see doing this very often. Especially with the trouble of working with GF dough – at least this recipe, which like I said is one of the better ones. I may try another dough recipe some day, or just make noodles which is way less complicated. But for now I’m really glad I did these two experiments!

Ravioli [GF]

Tortellini [GF]