Cooking Basics.
Many times I’ve been asked about Japanese food and cooking tips, basically people want the cooking basics of Japanese food without the hassle of trying to follow a Japanese cooking tutorial.
I understand why, it can be scary to watch a video and try to follow it when the person is talking at a normal speed. So where do you get the cooking basics if not YouTube? Well for me the obvious answer is anime (and manga).
What? You’re saying that’s not the obvious place to get the cooking basics? OK, then let me show you how to find them in a very easy to follow package.. though I hope you like subs more than dubs for this one.
Cooking Basics with anime!!!!
First off, let me start by telling you that we are not even gonna look at a certain shonen cooking battler where the only thing faker than the cooking was the peoples reactions to the food.
What we will be doing is looking at rather is a slice of life anime that shows the growth of the main character both as a cook and as a person. This anime has a very confusing sounding name of “Koufuku Graffiti”.
While it may sound like a show about graffiti, it is a wholesome story centred around life, change, and food.
The first episode opens with our main character, one Ryou Machiko, trying to make a dish that she use to make with her late grandmother. The dish came out bland and nothing like the dish her grandmother taught her to make.
So she decides to go back to the basics of cooking to try and find what went wrong. Along the way she is joined by other characters who also need to get use to changing life.
I don’t wanna spoil anything so I’ll stop there. What I will say is that even the most basic of the the cooking basics they handle, they explain it step by step so that even a complete amateur can try to follow.
They also make cooking look fun, and the food looks delicious. They even make take-out pizza look delicious and I don’t even eat pizza.
Interestingly, this story didn’t start as a OVA (original video animation) but as a manga that got made into a anime. This happens to many manga and sometimes you learn about the anime from the manga or the manga from the anime.
Cooking basics with Manga?!?!
Koufuku Graffiti started out as a 4koma, of four panel manga, a short form manga that isn’t the best way to share complex recipes, we have to look at a different manga for that.
The one I like is called クッキンハ゜ハ゜ (kukkin papa or Cooking Papa). This is an anthology (collection of stories) with the main group being university aged or working adults.
Each chapter has a story about events in their lives, but each has a dish that someone made for the event. After the chapter you are treated to not only the recipe but a step by step guide to make it and I do mean step by step.
In one recipe I saw they had you turn over the dish and return it to the pan so that you could cook it evenly, they had three pictures draw how to turn it out and return it correctly and safely.
These manga are not translated into English and they are older, still even Cooking Papa got an anime made of it.
To be honest, there are many more here in Japan that never got translated into English, and many more that never got anime adaptations.
What I find interesting is that they are not only written about food, but to teach younger people how to cook on their own.
I think this is probably the most important thing for me. They are not about fighting or beating people, they are about making sure the younger generations don’t live off of instant ramen alone.
Practical cooking basics?
See? I told you we can learn the Japanese cooking basics from manga and anime. The trick is that we have to look a little to the right sometimes.
And I’ll admit I like one of the older battle style cooking anime. This was back when I just started getting into experimenting with baking.
I ran across an strangely specific anime called “Yakitare!!Ja-pan” and I’ll freely admit that their ideas gave rise to some of my more excentric bread recipes.
This is the beauty of the Japanese cooking anime and manga. It doesn’t matter if you are just learning the cooking basics or have been cooking for years.
They are made to spark your imagination and make you want to cook. So let’s see what the we can learn from the true cooking animes and mangas.
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