The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook: 100 Recipes for Every Kind of Amazing Pasta

There are 33 different pasta dough recipes in this sturdy and practical book. That’s an impressive number when one considers that many pasta books settle for two or three or even just one.

Lucy Vaserfirer, a culinary instructor and author of a number of previous cookbooks, thoughtfully assumes that if you’ve gone to the trouble of buying a pasta machine, you’re interested in the best possible results when it comes to the pasta itself. Thus you’ll find doughs and detailed instructions for the using sheeter and separate doughs and instructions for the extruder. There’s also a section for cavatelli makers, again with doughs and instructions.

And in each section there are an abundance of flavor variations, from the familiar spinach and beet additions for color, to doughs that use rye, chesnut, and chickpea flour, sourdough starter, whey, duck eggs, and butternut squash (in the dough itself). Most doughs are for Italian pastas, but there are udon, soba, and ramen recipes as well. If you’re one of those visually creative souls who wants colorfully striped doughs, or laminated sheets with fresh herbs inside, Vaserfirer is there for you.

There are attractive and imaginative finished pasta dishes as well. We don’t mean to slight them when we say that the pasta-making sections are worth the price of admission alone.

Paperback. Color photographs throughout.