Marc Vetri

“The number on thing you can do to bake a better pizza is to know your oven.” This is just one of the many things I have learned while trying to master pizza. How your pizza dough is crunchy or bubbly depending on the amount of water to flour ratio is another. What makes this book the most interesting is the time and sheer number of pages devoted to dough. To me, pizza as always been the sauce and the toppings, but what brings that together is the dough. This book goes way beyond, thin crust, pan, stuffed. It talks about fermentation, hydration, and even grinding your own flour. Way more complicated than I expected. But I also like it for that reason. It went beyond the craziness of putting granny smith apples and caramelized onions on the same pie, and to the philosophy of pizza, and how different philosophies make different pizzas.… (meer)

I requested this book by accident from NetGalley. I was in a hurry and thought the title was Mastering Pizza. What a great mistake! This book is amazing.

Mr. Vetri may be a famous chef, but at heart he is a scientist, a chemist who is curious about why flour and water combine in so many ways to make so many different kinds of delicious food. At the molecular level, how exactly is bread different from rigatoni? It's great reading.

This is an advanced (or whatever the next higher step above "advanced" is called) cookbook for someone who likes to mess around in the kitchen. If you want exact recipes and exact instructions, you will hate this book because Mr. Vetri absolutely does not want to you to cook by the clock. If you can't freewheel and judge the dough with your fingertips, you won't be happy.

The only reason I did not give this 5 stars is that the arrangement of recipes and story seems inconvenient, with same or similar information repeated many times in different places. The book requires that you read everything well in advance. Some recipes you can cook straight through but others begin by telling you how to make the pasta (info presented elsewhere too) and then tell you to dry the pasta 2 days before you start cooking.

A Master Recipe and variations approach might have worked better saying something like the first ingredient of the recipe is "XXX pasta dried 2 days (page XXX)." I find the chapter on Risotto technically interesting but one that belongs in a different book. Risotto is not made with flour like pasta and gnocchi.

I do not believe that this book will work well as an ebook although the authors have tried hard to anticipate that people will buy it that way.

I, with the greatest of luck, received an electronic advance review copy of "Mastering Pasta: The Art and Practice of Handmade Pasta, Gnocchi, and Risotto" by Marc Vetri and David Joachim (Ten Speed) through NetGalley.com.… (meer)