Pasta Tecnica
By Jr., Pasquale Bruno
About the Author
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Informative, illustrated, inspiring!
Most pasta books seem to spend a chapter on origins, a chapter on equipment and one little page - or less - on "basic" dough (usually with all purpose flour and eggs) and then fill the rest of the tome with sauce recipes. All well and good, but if you're looking for more, this book is one to consider.
While his basic recipe is the all purpose flour, egg and water recipe you will find in most books, he does include a section on making spinach pasta and another on using pasta secche (dried store bought made of semolina flour).
Mr. Bruno takes you step by step through the use of a manual pasta machine, rolling pin technique, several ravioli making methods, gnocchi, cappelleti and tortellini. My book (paperback, 1981) has black and white photos, but good quality such that all critical steps are well illustrated.
There are pasta sauce recipes and thankfully very little filler about the history of pasta, who first started using pasta, blah, blah, that you'll find in some other books. As Mr. Bruno puts it "This is a cookbook, not a history book...". Amen.
If you're in the market for a book on pasta making, I highly recommend this one for a good basic course. Thankfully, it is still in print (as of this writing) and easy to get your hands on.
Perfect basic home-made pasta
We love eating fresh pasta at home, and we are used to do it ourselfs...that's maybe the reason why I found this book a little bit too basic for us (if we were not so used, I would have rated it as 5 stars).
But in any case, I think it's the perfect book for those people who have never made fresh pasta at home! It has houndreds of pictures (no coloured) that show you the real italian way of making it!
Absolutley Decadent Recipes
One Christmas I recieved this book and a pasta maker as a Christmas gift. Boy, have I had some fun making pasta ever since. I do have a signature dish from this book, called Pasta Mezzaluna. It is a long process, but if the sauce is premade and the filing precooked it is not that long. My friends and family know this as my "wow" dish. It is like lasagna on steroids. I cannot say enough decadent things about it. The only thing I changed was omitting the bechemal sauce. wowowowowow-this book rocks with great ideas.
