In the next week, two major new pasta-focused cookbooks will become available: Marc Vetri'sMastering Pasta: the Art and Practice of Handmade Pasta, Gnocchi, and Risotto(written with David Joachim; Ten Speed Press: March 17) and Jenn Louis'Pasta by Hand: A Collection of Italy's Regional Hand-Shaped Pasta(Chronicle; March 24).
On the surface, they might seem like similar books: Both are written by respected American chefs cooking Italian food, with each book taking a deep dive into the subject of pasta. Neither are "restaurant cookbooks," in that they're meant to get dirty on your kitchen counter as opposed to looking pretty on your coffee table (though both are good-looking books). Most importantly, both are overall excellent books.
But unless you've had a big glass of the at-home pasta Kool-Aid, you don't want two books about pasta. This leaves us, the cookbook-buying audience, to ask a simple question: "Which book should I buy?" In this case, it really depends on what kind of pasta cookbook experience you're looking for.
MASTERING PASTA: The Pasta Encyclopedia
Marc Vetri is a fine-dining chef—his Philadelphia flagshipVetriis consistently named-checked as one of the best high-end Italian restaurants in the country. Yes, there are white tablecloths, but Vetri isn't using molecular gastronomy parlor tricks to make Italian food something that it's not. Imagine if an Italiannonnasuddenly got ambitious and decided to open a four-star restaurant—that juxtaposition sums up Vetri and, in some ways, the chef's pasta-centric bookMastering Pasta.
The book opens with this line: "Sometimes I feel like my life is one long sheet of pasta." Vetri is dedicated to proving he's truly mastered the stuff and can help you to do the same. Through the book's 10 chapters, Vetri covers everything you want to know about the subject: there are step-by-step tutorials on fresh, filled, and even machine-extruded pastas (both dried and fresh—no, extruded doesn't always mean dried); an appendix on classical stocks, sauces, and other pasta making-adjacent basics; heck, Vetri even includes a chart that details wheat anatomy (ICYMI—bran, germ, and endosperm).
这本书需要时间建议“面食互换,”高lighting shapes that go well with similar sauce and ingredient sets. So feel empowered to bust out the rest of thatbucatiniyou made the night before, even though the recipe calls forstrozzapreti.
Who Will Love This Book: You're looking for a complete, 360 degree view of at-home pasta making. You've likely made pasta at home a handful of times and are ready to jump in deep. You want the tools to make just about any shape of pasta imaginableandhave ambitious, restaurant-y preparations to pair them with.
Oh, and an interest in wheat anatomy doesn't hurt.
PASTA BY HAND: The Weeknight Pasta Bible
If Vetri is an Italiannonnatrapped inside a classically-trained chef's body, Jenn Louis is the laid-back aunt in the same family. Her Portland restaurantLincolnserves an Italian-focused menu, but with a more casual vibe and no tasting menus. Louis isn't trying to prove that she's mastered every Italian regional quirk with her food—her food has modern influences, drawing on other cultures by including non-Italian ingredients like tahini and za'atar.Pasta By Handkeeps that casual spirit alive by taking a single-subject approach to pasta making and only focusing on—surprise!—hand-made pasta recipes.
All the fresh pasta here is "hand-made," meaning none of the recipes in Louis' book require special equipment (namely, a KitchenAid attachment or rolling pin) to flatten dough into thin sheets. Every last pasta can only be made with your own two hands. You'll learn how to make recognizable dishes like Tuscan potato *gnocchi * and winter squashcavatelli, but Louis delves into lesser known shapes like a semolinafrascarelli(small, irregularly-shaped chunks) ortrofie(long, thin twists that are formed with a bench scraper).
At the back of the book is an index of sauces: Some, like a quick-and-easyall'amatriciana, take less than 20 minutes to throw together, while others are of the long, slow-simmer variety. Louis is flexible, always suggesting at least two sauce pairings for each pasta and often many more than that. That way, you can make sauces in big batches and reuse them, or choose a pairing that matches how much time you're willing to spend on dinner.
Who Will Love This Book: You don't have access to or don't have an interest in buying special pasta equipment. Your pasta making ambitions are more specific: if you're obsessed with gnocchi and all of it's easy-to-make relative shapes, there's no better book on the market.
