My inbox has been overflowing as of late with various questions and frequently there are many quite similar to each other. While I love reading and hope to provide a little assistance in response, time does not permit me to respond to every e-mail as I would desire. I have decided it might just be best to present a weekly Q & A post or two, as needed, to address these questions. Please forgive the delay it has taken to respond to many of your questions. Look for the answers here in the future…if I have them that is! 
Laura asked:
Have you soaked your grains when making homemade pasta? How do you do it?
Charmayne asked a similar question:
In Nourishing Traditions, she does not cover pasta as she says that the pasta is not soaked, sprouted, etc. I was surprised that she had very little to say on pasta as it is a staple in many homes and it is a huge part of the Italian culture. Do you know of any recipe/book that covers soaking/sprouting pasta grains?
My research and discussion on this topic has proven that pasta is one that unfortunately cannot be soaked including that of soaking store bought pasta or in the process of making homemade pasta. You actually can purchase sprouted pasta made from sprouted grain from Food for Life, but I have yet to try it. Personally, I am not a huge fan of their products as I have found them to be incredibly dense and lacking flavor. This may or may not be the case with the pasta. There are recipes available for making your own sprouted grain or sourdough pasta if you are really adventurous. Weston Price provides a recipe for Sourdough Egg Noodles and Rejoice for Life has a recipe for sprouted or sourdough pasta. Go for it!
The option we choose as a family is using brown rice pasta. Brown rice has the lowest amount of phytates and thus a limited consumption of it is not too problematic. We use either Trader Joe’s brown rice pasta or Tinkyada brown rice pasta (our source is through Azure Standard). Both are excellent and delicious, although more sticky than the average pasta.
I know many of my readers have alot of ideas and knowledge, so feel free to share!
How do you cook Brown Rice noodles without ending up with a lumpy sticky gooey mess?
Always undercook them and then rinse with water after draining them. It works great!
I’ve been making sourdough bread for a while now, partly for taste reasons and partly for health. I also love making pasta now and then, but began to be concerned that I was blithely eating in pasta all those phytates and undigested gluten that I was so carefully avoiding in my bread! So I got to wondering whether you could apply the sourdough principle to pasta and recently got around to trying it.
I made a standard pasta dough (4oz white flour to 1 egg) and added a little sourdough starter. After 24 hours it had risen. I knocked it down and left in in the fridge another day. When I came to prepare the pasta, the main differences from regular pasta were that dough was softer and springier, and also how it cooks – the dough doesn’t seem to expand so much as usual. I used the setting on my pasta machine that would normally give quite a thick noodle, but what I got was a much thinner, more translucent noodle than I would have expected. Maybe this is because some of the starch that would normally swell up gets used up in the fermentation?
So I would say if you want thick chewy noodles, roll the dough thicker than you think you need. Flavour-wise they were great – a definite but subtle difference from regular pasta, with less of a sour flavour than I expected. Will definitely be trying again!
Purchasing pasta has not been possible with our budget, so I’ve just stayed with whole grains. But sometimes, a homemade batch is especially fun. I refer to the Sourdough Noodle recipe linked to above.
Michele
Thank you so much for answering my question. The other ideas are great too! I really enjoy all of the tips you have on your site. I am practicing all these new techniques. I had not heard of soaking before I read your site.
I have used the brown pasta for a long time, but it’s gotten a little too expensive for me right now. So I started experimenting with soaking pasta dough, and making it by hand. WOW! We love it! I will be sharing the recipe soon on my blog. It’s yet another option.
We do the same thing!
A friend of mine sprouts her wheat, just to the point of sprouting then she dries it (in a dehydrater) and grinds that into flour. She uses her hand mill and her regular Nutrimill (as long as it is thoroughly dry – wet will kill a Nutrimill!). This is supposed to give the benefits of soaking/sprouting. She then uses that flour to make anything she normally does with flour. I wonder if that would work with pasta for those that want to go to that work!
A note on Trader Joe’s brown rice pasta:
You can greatly reduce the extra “sticky” aspect by rinsing with cold/tepid water immediately after draining and then mixing a little olive oil into the bowl of pasta, mix with your hands to ensure each piece gets coated (A little oil is all that is necessary). This works fine with white pasta too