Video Membership Site

Buy a 1-year subscription to our video membership site to gain unlimited access to our huge collection of 150+ video recipes, eBooks, and articles on techniques and ingredients of the Italian kitchen, so that you can learn whenever it suits your schedule, in the comfort of your kitchen, and at your own pace. Click here to become a member!

Culinary Tours to Italy

Join us in Italy on a once-in-a-lifetime food lover's tour! Click here to see our tour schedule. All our tours share the same philosophy: our aim is to immerse you fully in the regional cuisine. You'll savor local specialties, meet food artisans, and learn authentic Italian cooking in hands-on cooking classes. We visit smaller destinations rather than large tourist centers, favoring small gems where you can really feel part of the fabric of Italian life. Whether you're tasting wines in the Tuscan hills, making fresh mozzarella in Puglia, honing your pasta skills in Sicily, or dining in Portofino, you'll savor every delicious moment of your time with us.

Subscribe To Newsletter
  • Rustico Cooking facebook
  • Rustico Cooking Twitter
  • Rustico Cooking Pinterest

The Best Pasta Sauces Cookbook

By Micol Negrin, Founder of Rustico Cooking


Micol Negrin

I’m very excited to announce that my third cookbook was published on October 28, 2014 by Ballantine Books (a division of Random House). I had a lot of fun researching and writing THE BEST PASTA SAUCES: Favorite Regional Italian Recipes, and the process allowed me to discover some incredibly delicious specialties from every region of Italy. There is mouth-watering color photography throughout; the book is a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach!

It was hard to decide which recipes to include; there are so many pasta treasures across Italy!! But in the end, I narrowed the selection down to the 80 recipes I felt best represented the diverse sauces of Italy’s regions. Some are classics, of course, like pesto, amatriciana, puttanesca, and ragu, but others are little-known outside Italy. In fact, there were some recipes that were eye-opening even for me (and I’ve eaten and cooked a lot of pasta over the years!!), like the Crushed Potato Sauce with Cracked Black Pepper and Olive Oil from the Marches (I never thought about boiling potatoes to create a clean vegetal puree with which to sauce pasta!), the Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce with Bread Crumbs from Apulia (I always simmered tomato sauces on the stove for my pasta, never roasted them), and the Parmigiano Sauce with Fresh Nutmeg from Piedmont (what a difference the nutmeg makes!).

The Best Pasta Sauces by Micol Negrin

Not only did I love testing the recipes—who wouldn’t love eating a different delicious pasta every day?—I also really enjoyed working on the photography with my husband Dino; we styled the food together, and Dino took amazing photographs that make my mouth water every time I look at them (and I’ve looked at them a lot!).

The book also includes tips for cooking pasta perfectly and for saucing it with success every time; there are 5 basic recipes indispensable to any home cook; sidebars sprinkled throughout about our travels in Italy, essential Italian ingredients, and more; and wine pairings by RUSTICO COOKING’s Wine Director, Costas Mouzouras.

Hopefully the book will inspire you to try new sauces and to experiment with different ingredients and flavors… I look forward to hearing which recipes you try!

Available in bookstores, and from online sellers including:



click book to see inside!

More Photos

from Calabria: Pureed Sweet Pepper and Tomato Sauce with Basil and Guanciale

from Trentino-Alto Adige: Smoked Pork Sauce with Chives

from the Veneto: Caramelized Radicchio and Onion Sauce

from Basilicata: Silky Broccoli Raab, Garlic, and Crushed Red Pepper Sauce