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Barilla Chickpea Casarecce | Chewsday Review

Each week in my memberships (Baby Mealtimes and Toddler Mealtimes) we have a ‘challenge’ food to offer our kids. It’s all about inspo and variety. Last week we had pulse pasta and lots of people had seen it but weren’t sure if it was any good. Here’s my thoughts on Barilla Chickpea Casarecce for this week’s Chewsday Review.

Ingredients

Positives

Excellent fibre content. This is 4.5 times more fibre than in regular Barilla casarecce. Assuming your child ate the equivalent of 1/2 a cup of uncooked pasta, this works out to 7g of fibre which is 50% of a young child’s fibre recommendation, and 40% of an older child’s daily fibre recommendations.
Excellent low sodium content at 5mg/100g. As a comparison, regular casarecce has the same low amount.
Low sugar content of 2.9g/100g (none added, all naturally occurring).
High protein content of 21g/100g which is 1.75x that of regular Barilla Casarecce. Having said that, most Australian kids get plenty of protein so this isn’t necessarily a huge benefit.

Negatives

This pasta is pretty expensive, at 3 times the price of regular wheat pasta. It comes in a smaller box too, which is annoying for bigger families.
The pulse pasta does have a slightly different texture to wheat pasta, which can take some warming up to. I found this one fine with sauce on it, but my toddler didn’t like it plain (to be fair, she didn’t like the shape more than anything )

Marketing

Alternatives

This pulse pasta gets a huge Chewsday round of applause from me. Serve it to your family! If you have a toddler or very hesitant eater, choose a familiar shape and present it alongside other safe foods. It’s always risky pretending it’s normal pasta, and this destroys trust if your little one is already on the suspicious side.
But, just to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing “wrong” with regular pasta, this is just another way to add variety.