With a huge percentage of the population staying at home as the world weathers the coronavirus , there has been a massive increase in home cooking. If youve visited a grocery store or attempted to place an Instacart order recently, youre probably familiar with the picked-over state of the shelves, butcher counters and produce sections as folks try to stock up on essentials.

Unfortunately, this uptick in grocery shopping means that certain high-demand items are consistently challenging to find. And this list includes crucial staples like pasta, rice, flour and milk.

Luckily, many of these hard-to-find items have easier-to-locate alternatives, which could be well worth a try if youd rather avoid unnecessary supermarket stress. We asked a group of chefs and kitchen pros for their favorite under-the-radar ingredient substitutions, and they delivered with this list of 10 replacement suggestions.

Pasta: Instead, try shirataki or rice noodles

Pasta aisles are among the most ransacked grocery store sections right now, and if youre in need of a box of ziti to pair with a jar of marinara or a homemade bolognese sauce, you may find yourself out of luck.

However, chef and food writer Ariane Resnick advises shoppers to mosey over to the international foods section, where they can locate viable alternatives to typical wheat-based pastas. Lately, Ive found that wheat pasta is hard to get, but rice pasta, shirataki noodles and other alternative forms are available. Brown rice pasta cooks up very similarly to wheat. Note that it does not keep equally well it will dry out and needs to be reheated with liquid, unlike wheat pasta, which can be used cold in dishes like macaroni salad, Resnick explained.