"salt to taste" news and stories

'Salt to Taste: The Keys to Confident, Delicious Cooking'
By Marco Canora with Catherine Young
Photographs by John Kernick
Rodale -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon

If you've never had the experience of eating a meal at Marco Canora's restaurant Hearth in New York's East Village, this book brings that soulful experience to you. If you have eaten there, you'll certainly want to pick up this book to recreate that experience at home. With "Salt to Taste," Canora gives you the skills to fill your kitchen with some of the Tuscan magic he plates at the restaurant.

Canora uses his wisdom at chef to explain what works in restaurant kitchen and what will work in your kitchen at home. He lays out the steps to making pasta at home and gives you three separate recipes for the dough -- each with its own specific use. Although that may sound complicated, it's not at all -- it's actually quite smart. And the chef also shares a variety of red sauces to show the complexity of Italian cuisine.

Filled with straightforward dishes that are the building blocks of wonderful Italian feasts, this cookbook is equal parts cooking inspiration and teacher. As the subtitle implies, there's definitely a level of confident cooking anyone can learn from this book.

See what we tested and whether it's worth buying after the jump.