Rice – Make quinoa sticky like rice

Quinoa naturally contains a bitter compound on the outside of the seed. Usually you have to rinse the quinoa to remove the bitterness but most commercial quinoa seems to have already been rinsed. So, I no longer rinse my quinoa. If you have time, it's nice to heat a pan and add the quinoa and toast it a little (for a nutty flavor and fluffier texture), then add water and salt. I typically bring the water to a boil (2 cups water to 1 cup quinoa plus 1/4 tsp salt), cover and reduce the heat to a simmer for 10-20 minutes (or until the little tails release). Lately I've found that using a rice cooker is a no-fuss way to prepare quinoa. I usually just do quinoa, water and sea salt but you can add spices while cooking it if you want to enhance the flavor. I would add vegetables afterwards. Quinoa is so quick-cooking I wouldn't see the need for a pressure cooker.

In the pastas that I have made the structure of the noodle is built out of protein- usually entirely from gluten from wheat flour. In fact the base of my pasta is just flour and water (or juice or pureed vegetables, etc.) Egg noodles, obviously get structure from the egg.

Quinoa has no gluten and will impart no structure to a typical pasta.

You could easily add it to a normal pasta recipe as long as it was not in so high a concentration as to compromise the gluten structure. Without experimenting I don't know what ratio this would be.

A cursory google search found several quinoa pasta recipes. The ones I looked at were similar in that they relied on a variety of starches and egg for structure. I imagine these would taste fine but they would be more like dumplings or egg noodles than al dente Italian pasta.

The results of the quick search:

http://gfgourmet.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/quinoa-pasta/

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Make-Quinoa-Pasta&id=3181479