Best Cookbooks of 2024

One of the best parts of writing A Serious Bunburyist comes yearend when I choose my five favorite cookbooks of the year. I generally gravitate to single subject, professional chef, and restaurant books; this year is no different. In alphabetical order, I share my picks for the five best cookbooks of 2024.

Café Cecilia Cookbook by Max Rocha (Phaidon)

The Four Horsemen: Food + Wine for Good Times by Nick Curtola with Gabe Ulla + James Murphy, Notes on Wine by Justin Chearno (Abrams)

Konbini: Cult Recipes, Stories and Adventures from Japan’s Iconic Convenience Stores by Brendan Liew and Caryn Ng (Smith Street Books)

The Turkey Book: A Chef’s Journal of Hunting and Cooking America’s Bird by Jesse Griffiths (St. John Press)

Very Good Bread: The Science of Dough and the Art of Making Bread at Home by Melissa Weller (Knopf)

Here’s why I selected these titles.

Café Cecilia Cookbook Rocha shares recipes to make simple food (think Richard Olney’s Simple French Food (here) and Fergus Henderson’s fare (here), for whom Rocha worked for at St. John in London).  Café Cecilia’s elegant book design feels both modern and handsomely retro. I baked Rocha’s Guinness Bread using a locally made stout from Original Pattern in Oakland, CA, and the result tasted delicious. The book has a strong pasta section, probably because Rocha worked at The River Café. I plan to make his recipe for Odette’s Pork Pasta over the holidays. Again: a beautiful, handsome cookbook with great photographs by Matthieu Lavanchy.

The Four Horsemen This cookbook drew my interest when I learned that Nick Curtola, the chef at The Four Horsemen restaurant in New York City, worked for Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain at Camino in Oakland, CA. Sadly, Camino closed its doors in 2018, but, fortunately, Russ and Allison first penned an outstanding cookbook in 2015 entitled This is Camino (here). With Curtola’s Camino ties, I wondered what his recipes might offer. I see Camino’s ethos of simplicity in Curtola’s offerings: Grilled Flatbread; Sugar Snap Peas with Calabrian Chile, Mint, and Ricotta Salata; Little Gems with Green Goddess, Radishes, and Fried Croutons. But clearly Curtola’s food for The Four Horsemen is his own. With the restaurant’s wine credentials—it won a James Beard Award for the best wine program in the United State—most of the cookbook’s dishes pair well with wine. If you like cookbooks that tell a story, then enjoy this tale of how a bunch of profoundly naïve folks thought they could open a restaurant in NYC without any real experience to speak of. Well...they did and it’s an unexpected Cinderella story. We are now the happy recipients of its talented chef’s recipes in The Four Horsemen.

Konbini This unique book gets my nod for the most enjoyable cookbook of 2024. One of the surprising highlights of my trip to Japan in 2018 was the pleasure and excitement experienced each time I turned into a Japanese 7-Eleven konbini. The story of how a US-born convenience store traveled overseas to Japan and blossomed comes to life in Brendan Liew and Caryn Ng’s Konbini. I enjoyed reading the history of Japan’s 7-Eleven, Family Mart and Lawson convenience stores. I learned about these konbini’s seasonal offerings and regional variations. Liew and Ng offer a generous helping of elevated recipes that help you to recreate classic konbini food offerings in the comfort of your own kitchen. Some dishes, like onigiri, barely need a recipe, but the book provides useful process photographs that show how to form these delicious Japanese rice balls. I look forward to trying out some of Konbini’s chicken recipes: fried chicken, karaageand roast chicken. Kudos to the book’s designer, Evi-O.Studio, and photographer, Gorta Yuuki. Both contribute mightily to Konbini’s overall success.

The Turkey Book I wrote about this single subject cookbook earlier this year (here). In summary: The Turkey Book is a generous, interesting and well-written book on the art of hunting and cooking turkey. Expect strong recipes from a James Beard winning cookbook author and talented chef.

Very Good Bread Melissa Weller, together with Carolynn Carreño, penned one of my favorite baking books, A Good Bake (2020). This year Weller follows up her modern classic with Very Good Bread. I wish I had this book when I began baking! Clear, concise recipes give the baker all the information necessary to produce outstanding results. I’m particularly looking forward to making Weller’s recipe for M’smen, a laminated flatbread from Morocco. Very Good Breadcontains an extensive section on making bagels. Weller is a real pro—she served as the head baker at Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant in NYC—and her latest book should more than satisfy both the beginning and experienced baker.

If I do not get around to writing another post by year’s end, wishing you Season’s Greetings and a Healthy, Sane 2025.

Pasta Day 2024

Here in the United States, 17 October's National Pasta Day has come and gone. However, it’s not too late to commemorate World Pasta Day on 25 October 2024. The good folks at Emiliomiti are offering 20% off all standard pasta dies. This sale ends on 27 October, so if you are in the market for a new pasta die, check out https://pastabiz.com.

To mark Pasta Day(s), I am sharing a list of my go-to pasta-related books, both reference and culinary. These titles hold pride of place in my collection. If you dig around this site, you will see that I frequently reference many of these books.

To keep this post short, I will not cover the “why” behind my list other than to say each enriches my understanding of pasta cookery.

An A-Z of Pasta by Rachel Roddy, Fig Tree / Penguin, 2021.

American Sfoglino by Evan Funke with Katie Parla, Chronicle Books, 2019.

Bugialli on Pasta by Giuliano Bugialli, Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli, Clarkson Potter, 2003.

Encyclopedia of Pasta by Oretta Zanini De Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, University of California Press, 2009.

The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand & Jacob Kenedy, Quirk Books, 2010.

Pasta by Missy Robbins and Talia Baiocchi, Ten Speed Press, 2021.

The Pasta Codex by Vincenzo Buonassisi, Rizzoli, 2020.

Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison, Books One and Two, Hardie Grant, 2019 & 2022.

Sauces & Shapes by Oretta Zanini De Vita and Maureen B. Fant, W. W. Norton, 2013.

Happy Pasta Day, everyone!

Tipo 00 - The Pasta Cookbook

In my last post (here) I wrote that I ordered Andreas Papadakis’s Tipo 00 – The Pasta Cookbook (Allen & Unwin, Australia) from Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City. Papadakis co-owns and is the chef at Tipo 00, a pasta bar in Melbourne, Australia. With Papadakis’s fine dining background and his restaurant’s pasta-centric focus, I looked forward to diving into his new cookbook.

Tipo 00 looks splendid with its handsome teal blue cover, clean layout and especially lovely and instructive photographs by Mark Roper.

Papadakis divides Tipo 00 into eight main chapters: How to Make Pasta; Long Pasta; Pasta, Filled and Shaped; Risotto; Home Classics; Not Pasta; Tipomisu and Other Desserts; and Basics and Other Essentials.

I found something worthwhile in each of these sections. But what really interests me is Papadakis’s master pasta dough recipe.

Many restaurant-based cookbooks offer up a luxe egg yolk-rich dough recipe. Some examples: Rich Table (210 grams all-purpose flour to 12 large egg yolks); Flour + Water (360 grams tipo 00 flour to approximately 18 to 20 yolks); and Missy Robbins’s Pasta (500 grams tipo 00 flour to approximately 24 to 26 yolks).

I appreciate that these recipes document a restaurant’s process. It is interesting to understand a Michelin-star chef’s pasta ratios.  But using 24 to 26 egg yolks to make pasta is something home cooks would likely not entertain. So finding a pasta dough recipe from a great chef that offers a more accessible balance of egg and yolk and flour for the home cook feels welcoming.

Papadakis’s introduces Tipo 00’s master pasta dough like this:

“We use a lot of different doughs to make our pasta in the restaurant, but this is a good universal recipe. For home cooks, the main thing to note is the dryness of the dough—I believe that many recipes for making pasta at home produce a dough that is too wet. This might be easier to roll and shape, but it won’t have the right strength. If your pasta dough is too wet, once you put the rolled and cut or shaped pasta in boiling water to cook, it quickly takes on the consistency of a dumpling.”

Papadakis’s dough gains its strength, in part, from a 70:30 ratio of tipo 00 flour to semolina flour. Adding semolina allows the pasta maker to “reduce the amount of egg yolks needed to bind the dough, and so the pasta will be less rich and eggy.” Papadakis warns that this drier dough might prove a challenge for smaller home pasta machines. His restaurant employs an Imperia R220 Manual Pasta Machine to sheet its dough.

I made Tipo 00’s master dough following Papadakis’s recipe to the letter. I usually use my mixer’s paddle/beater attachment to bring my pasta dough together, but I trusted Papadakis’s instructions and employed a dough hook per his recipe. To help ensure proper dough hydration, I typically slowly add egg to flour. But again, I heeded Papadakis’s process and simply added the egg mixture into a flour well that I formed in the mixer’s bowl.

In the end, the recipe worked out great. My dough didn’t look quite as dry as the dough pictured on page 22 of Tipo 00, but this might be because I used a double milled rather than a course semolina flour. 

I also followed Papadakis’s rolling and folding instructions. They produced a beautiful pasta sheet that neatly fit the width of my Imperia R220 machine.

Here’s Papadakis’s master pasta dough recipe, which serves 4 to 6, with his rolling and folding instructions. The asides are Papadakis’s.

350 g (12 oz) ‘00’ flour

150 g (5½ oz) durum wheat semolina flour

1 teaspoon sea salt

65 g (2¼ oz) egg yolk (from about 3-4 eggs)

190 g (6¾ oz) whole egg (about 4 eggs)

If using an electric mixer, place both flours and the salt in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment. Make a well in the centre and add the egg yolk and whole egg. (I find it easier to weigh the egg yolks in a clean bowl first and then the whole eggs to the same bowl up to the total amount of eggs, which is 255 g (9 oz) for this recipe. The total amount of egg is the important part.) Mix on slow speed for 8-10 minutes, until you start seeing large crumbs forming and the dough starts coming together. Transfer the dough to a clean benchtop and knead by hand until it comes together. Don’t expect it to be really smooth, as this is a drier dough—it will come together more and get smoother in the rolling process.

To make the dough by hand, combine both flours and the salt in a mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the egg yolk and whole egg. Mix with a fork until just combined, then transfer to a clean benchtop and knead by hand for 6-8 minutes until the dough comes together.

If the dough seems too dry and won’t come together, you can spray it a couple of times with your spray bottle of water—just be careful not to overdo it and make the dough too wet, since it will become more hydrated and softer as it rests.

I like to shape the dough into a roughly rectangular block, rather than a ball, as I find it easier to feed through the pasta machine later. Wrap your dough really well in plastic film, making it as airtight as possible (at the restaurant we use a vacuum sealer).

If you are planning to make your pasta straight away, let the dough rest for at least an hour at room temperature—but ideally refrigerate it overnight, then take it out a couple of hours before rolling and cutting to let it come back to room temperature.

To make the rolling more manageable, it’s best to work with a relatively small amount of dough, so divide it in two before you start. (If you are not using all the dough at once, you can refrigerate the rest of it, tightly wrapped, for up to 3 days.)

Rolling and Folding the Dough

Set up the pasta machine on a solid benchtop. Using your hands or a rolling pin, flatten the dough enough that it will go through the widest setting on the pasta machine, then pass it through the rollers two or three times, going down one notch each time.

Bring both sides of the dough to the centre, so they meet in the middle, then fold in half to create four layers of dough.

Roll the dough through the widest setting again, then repeat the folding and rolling process one more time—but this time bring one third of the dough into the centre, laying it over the middle third, then cover with the last third to create three layers.

Flatten the dough again, so that it will go through the widest setting on your machine, then pass it through the rollers, going down one notch at a time; it should be smooth by now and starting to become elastic. Keep going until the pasta sheets are the thickness you need.

I followed Papadakis’s advice: I let the dough rest one hour at room temperature and worked with only half of my dough (storing the remainder in the refrigerator.) I finished rolling my pasta at a setting between 3 and 2 on my R220 machine. I let the sheets dry out for a bit on each side. I then dusted the pasta with some flour and stacked the sheets on a tray that I lightly covered with plastic film and stored in the refrigerator. An hour or so before cooking, I cut the pasta into tagliatelle.

My family really enjoyed the taste and, especially, the texture of Papadakis’s pasta. The noodles had an excellent firm bite and delicious flavor. I will definitely add this pasta dough recipe into my repertoire.

Tipo 00 contains a large number of pasta dishes that I look forward to trying: Squid ink tagliolini with calamari; Asparagus ravioli with parmesan cream; and Cannelloni with smoked eggplant & ricotta. If you are looking for a solid pasta cookbook to add to your collection, check out Andreas Papadakis’s Tipo 00.