Philadelphia Weekly

This fall two of the city's top chefs, Marc Vetri and Jose Garces, released cookbooks. A few weeks ago I documented my harrowing 12-hour meal from Garces' Latin Evolution. This month I turn to Vetri's new tome, Il Viaggio di Vetri. I was relieved to discover that, on the whole, Il Viaggio is far more accessible to home cooks.

Flip to a random recipe and chances are, with ingredients on hand, you can prepare it after work. In the time it takes to make a boring casserole, you could instead try your hand at a squid and artichoke galette, sauteed peaches and porcini, and grilled swordfish with apricot and fennel. This isn't to say that Vetri is aiming for 30-minute meals, but the dishes that are time-consuming and fussy (ragout, spit-roasted baby lamb) come with plenty of shortcuts in the Prep Ahead and Improv sections.

I aimed to prepare the ricotta gnocchi with crispy artichokes. At Vetri's restaurants, pastas and vegetable dishes tend to be the most memorable, and these sections of the cookbook are my favorite. I discovered that my kitchen was stocked with all but two ingredients--baby artichokes and dry ricotta.

Procuring the latter was my first misstep in preparing this straightforward dish. To me, "dry ricotta" means ricotta salata. Numerous websites and my local cheese monger assured me of this, but I seriously doubt Vetri intended this ingredient, since the previous recipe mentions ricotta salata by name.

The ricotta is combined with a half-cup of flour, a half of a large egg (which I measured precisely) and kosher salt. Vetri instructs that these ingredients should be combined in a bowl and stirred with a spoon. But breaking up ricotta salata is not unlike trying to whip frozen butter, a problem solved by passing it through a food processor.

The second challenge is that half an egg provides not nearly enough moisture, making it impossible to create anything that resembles a "soft ball" or "dough." So I added about a quarter cup of water to achieve something that more closely resembled dough. I wisely omitted the salt since the cheese is already salted (hence its name).

The flour-dusted balls looked and felt nothing like past gnocchi I've made. They were firm and dense, not springy or soft. When placed in boiling water they sunk to the bottom of the pot and I felt overcome with doom. I began Googling "ricotta gnocchi" immediately. Most recipes called for traditional ricotta, or ricotta mixed with potato. Either way the missing ingredient was moisture.

The final result was edible but by no means anything that would gracefully float out of the kitchen doors at Vetri. The crispy artichokes, however, were divine (and very similar to the $10 side dish on Osteria's menu). I'm pretty sure the recipe would've succeeded with drained ricotta from a white plastic tub.

But I've by no means given up on this cookbook, which contains some of my favorite dishes, from the heavenly cauliflower flan to the spinach gnocchi. I know it'll be a go-to volume for special-occasion meals. My only disappointment is in the book's presentation.

Why toss in grainy, low-resolution photos of the restaurant and more than 20 photos of the chef when all we need is clear, close-up, step-by-step pictures of how to make Vetri's delicious pasta? There's but a smattering of such photos--skillful hands spinning pici ropes and forming casoncelli--and these are the ones I looked at the longest. How can you describe the process of spit-roasting an entire animal without one prep photo?

Anyone who's enjoyed a meal at either of Vetri's restaurants will appreciate learning about his many apprenticeships, jealousy-inducing jaunts to Italy and his close-knit family of Italian chefs. Il Viaggio is supremely readable and inspired me to head to the kitchen, which is the mark of any successful cookbook. There's no guarantee I'll know exactly what to do once I get there, but the fact that Vetri knows is what matters the most.