I agree with KY. One thing is bread, another is pasta. Bread can take the texture, but pasta is supposed to have smoothness. That grit under your teeth, like scratching a blackboard!
Also, I believe there is no or very little nutrition in bran, there's roughage, fiber - roughage is what it is because it's not digested and therefore is not turned into something else, like nutritious food would be. The nutrition is in the germ and, yes, in the white part (don't think flour is empty calories, it isn't - there's some protein in there too, and if you put, say, a spoon or two of parmigiano on the pasta, you;ve completed the incomplete protein chains. Or you can add legumes or a little tuna or a few calamari, which, mixed with the white pasta, makes lots more protein than in both eaten separately.
So, for the sake of good eating, you can eat a couple of spoons of all bran and get the fiber out of the way, and then enjoy your (white) pasta. If you really want, a spoon of wheat germ will be undetected in a lot of sauces, if you really must go there. I even wonder if the whole wheat pasta HAS the germ, because wheat germ goes rancid and it would shorten the shelf life of the pasta.
Last edited: Aug 29, 2010
