Ten Speed Press Pasta: The Spirit and Craft of Italy's Greatest Food, with Recipes (A Cookbook)

This was bought as a gift and the recipient was very happy with it.

I have hundreds of cookbooks and this is easily in the top 10. Its informative and perfectly pitched for home cooking, comprehensive and authoritative while being charming and accessible, has just the right amount of text while still being a practical cookbook, the illustrations are beautiful and the recipes are simple but absolutely delicious. Its got great and practical recommendations for ingredients and tools. Its been an absolute blast making my way through this technique by technique and recipe by recipe and its also eye opening to discover what an art making home made pasta is. The only negative is that I learned about high-end pasta extruders here and now have to save up $2k to take my pasta game to the next level.

It IS a beautiful book and it does have interesting recipes and stunning photos. However, the first bit that put me off was the authors advice to use the mixer for making the dough and machine for tolling it, to the point when she doesn’t even say how thick to roll the pasta dough in case you’d do it by hand - instead she goes straight into numbers on a pasta machine. I don’t find it particularly traditional.My second issue is AMERICAN CLASSICS! This is a pasta book and for me, an authentic pasta book should contain authentic Italian recipes only - or cover all the other countries specialities.

If you already have a lot of pasta cookbooks and you are a little bit of a pasta addict like me, maybe you will think "oh, sure I don't need another pasta book" and then decide not to buy this one, but trust me, you will regret it. This is such an amazingly beautiful pasta cookbook, if not the best one. Sure, there are many great ones, but this one just feels a little bit more special. Even the paper (which I usually never notice) is so tactile and smooth, wonderful to touch while you are reading. The book teaches you how to cook pasta like a cook, how to touch it and feel it, how to look at it, listen to it and how to taste it. It developes an intuition, makes you aware of the process, how to notice the present and the little things while you are cooking it. This cookbook made me a much better pasta cook, even when I'm using a cheap, store bought pack of spagetti. And it covers everything, the doughs, the tools, the shapes, all the different names. There are great illustrations which make shaping the pasta a lot easier to understand. And then there are the recipes devided by regions. Each and every recipe is amazing. All of them. We are slowly going through them and enjoying every meal. Our kid loves it and we love it. Thank you Missy Robbins for sharing the knowlege and the craft.

Great recipes. Lots of helpful information. Best carbonara I’ve ever eaten.