Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The title says you'll gain "mastery" over pasta. But not really. The book would be more appropriately titled "Pasta For Beginners Plus Some Recipes for Advanced Chefs With Access To Rare Ingredients". The book had useful stuff but probably not a good choice if you're only going to read one book about pasta. For starters, it's 10% about making pasta and the rest a bunch of obscure recipes that have various noodles in them. It contains several inaccuracies and cooking myths that avid cooks will probably know but the casual beginner won't recognize and will take to heart as fact. Example? That boiling more water vs less will allow the pot to return to boil more quickly after adding your pasta. FALSE. Just a silly grandma cooking myth. There were others as well. Also, there is very little discussion on shaping pasta beyond some minor overview of rolling out dough. The approach for knife-cut pasta, sheets for ravioli, hand shaped, and extruded noodles are worth an entire chapter if you're going to "master pasta". Which should be drier? Wetter? Stronger dough? Weaker dough? It only received a single paragraph in the book barely hinting at what you need to know. So what do you do after you cut your pasta? Boil immediately? Dry it? Hang it? Refrigerate? Freeze? How does one create a nest that won't stick together after the noodles are cut? Those are mysteries unknown to this book mastering pasta. Interested in flavored and colored pastas like squid ink pasta? Spinach pasta? Not going to find out anything about that in this book. I also felt that a more thorough discussion on pasta shapes would've been warranted for a book proclaiming to master pasta. What influence does the pasta shape and size have on the sauce and final product to consider? Ridges? Tubes? Folds? Thick vs thin? Only a few sentences were offered about this.