Zucchini noodles substitutes

The same vegetable in a different color, and by far the closest match.

Best for

any recipe calling for zoodles, pesto, tomato sauces, stir-fries, cold noodle salads

Yellow squash spiralizes, cooks and tastes so much like zucchini that side by side most people only notice the color. The skin is a touch tougher and the flesh slightly sweeter and more seedy in the center, so a bowl of it tastes a shade sweeter and looks golden rather than green. Salt and drain it exactly as you would zucchini, since it holds just as much water.

A winter squash whose flesh separates into pasta-like strands after roasting.

Best for

baked pasta dishes, meat sauces, casseroles, make-ahead meals

The strands are shorter than zoodles and have a distinct crunchy-stringy chew rather than a soft slip, so a bolognese eaten over it feels chunkier and more like a vegetable dish. It also tastes clearly sweeter, almost squash-like, which fights slightly with lemony or delicate sauces and works beautifully with tomato and sausage. The catch is time: it needs about 40 minutes cut side down in a hot oven, versus two minutes for zoodles.

Translucent konjac noodles with essentially no carbs and no calories.

Best for

Asian noodle dishes, brothy soups, pad thai style stir-fries, very low-carb meals

They release almost no water, so unlike zoodles they will never dilute your sauce, which is a real advantage in a cream or cheese sauce. The bite is completely different though: springy, slightly rubbery and slippery, closer to a glass noodle than to soft pasta. They arrive packed in liquid that smells faintly of the sea, so rinse them for a full minute under running water and then dry-fry them in a hot dry pan for two to three minutes until they squeak, which drives off water and improves the texture enormously.

Canned hearts of palm cut into linguine shapes, the most convincing pasta look-alike.

Best for

linguine and fettuccine dishes, cream sauces, pesto, cacio e pepe style dishes

Pale, matte and floppy in exactly the way cooked pasta is, so a plated dish genuinely looks like pasta. The bite is softer than zoodles with a slight fibrous snap. The thing to fix is the flavor: straight from the can they taste briny and sour from the packing liquid. Rinse well, then either soak them ten minutes in milk or unsweetened almond milk or blanch them for one minute in salted water, and the sourness largely disappears.

Crisp raw strands for salads, never for a hot pan.

Best for

cold sesame noodle salads, Greek-style salads, peanut noodle bowls, summer sides

Raw cucumber noodles are crunchier and much more watery than raw zucchini, and they taste fresh and faintly grassy rather than neutral. That makes them excellent for chilled dressed dishes and hopeless for anything hot: heat them and they collapse into a pool of liquid within a minute. Seed the cucumber first with a spoon or use the firmer Persian or English varieties, and dress them right before serving.

The cheap, sturdy fallback when you have no zucchini and no gadget.

Best for

stir-fries, noodle soups, budget meals, meal prep

Cabbage cut into thin ribbons holds sauce well and turns sweet and silky after five minutes in a hot pan, but nobody will mistake it for pasta and it brings a distinctly cabbagey smell to the kitchen. Spiralized daikon is closer in shape, stays crunchy and tastes peppery and juicy, which suits Asian broths far better than an Italian tomato sauce. Both are far more forgiving than zoodles because they do not go limp.

The obvious answer if you were only using zoodles because a recipe said so.

Best for

any pasta dish, feeding people who are not low-carb, baked dishes

Worth stating plainly: if carbohydrate is not your reason for spiralizing, real pasta gives you a starchy surface that grips sauce, and the starchy cooking water that makes a sauce cling. Zoodles do neither, which is why zoodle dishes often taste watery. Cook the pasta one minute short of the package time and finish it in the sauce.