Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma is a popular cooking anime series starring Soma Yukihira, a creative and upbeat shonen hero who can make absolutely anything in the kitchen if he puts his heart into it. He soon finds himself enrolled at the elite Totsuki culinary academy, where he and his classmates prepare one mouth-watering dish after another. Viewers can practically taste them.
Given how the characters, usually culinary judges, gush over the incredible craftsmanship of these dishes, it seems impossible that an ordinary viewer could cook the way Soma and Erina do. Fortunately, Food Wars! fans don't have to graduate from Totsuki to prepare the dishes they see in this anime, as plenty of real-life resources exist to help fans cook a few anime treats in their own kitchen.
The Official Food Wars! Cookbook & Manga Recipes
Watching the Food Wars! anime will give fans a rough idea of how each dish is made, such as the key ingredients, the cooking implements used to make them, the seasonings involved and other basic details. That isn't a substitute for a full-blown recipe though, and the anime's episodes don't offer detailed recipes after the end credits. Fortunately, fans can try two different print resources to prepare the dishes they see in the Food Wars! anime.
One option is the Food Wars! manga, which spans 36 volumes. The manga and anime cover roughly the same amount of content, but the key difference is that the manga has complete recipes and directions for preparing every major dish seen in the story, usually at the end of a chapter where a dish is featured. These recipes list all the ingredients necessary and detailed instructions on how to prepare them, which should be enough for most kitchen-savvy fans to get started. However, these recipes have few photographs for reference, and inexperienced chefs might have trouble knowing which kitchen implements to use and how to use them correctly. In that case, fans can try another resource -- an independent Food Wars! cookbook.
Found on Amazon's online catalog, the Food Wars! Cookbook is a single volume detailing most major dishes featured in the original anime/manga franchise, including color photos of each dish for reference. The list of dishes ranges from authentic Japanese cuisine and Western culinary staples to the many exotic and creative dishes invented in the story of Food Wars, including fried bear meat, Kofta kebab burgers and improvised mackerel burger steak. This self-published cookbook does contain some rather demanding recipes, but others may be more manageable for everyday Food Wars! fans, and some might even improvise cheaper, simpler versions of what they see in this cookbook.
Food Wars! Recipes On YouTube
YouTube offers even more resources for Food Wars! fans who either want to prepare these delectable anime dishes for themselves or simply watch skilled chefs prepare real-life versions of these recipes and see how they turn out. The Feast of Fiction YouTube channel features many culinary guides for dishes found in fictional works, and of course, that involves a few Food Wars! dishes, including some of Soma's best.
In this particular video, the two hosts prepare Soma's Gotcha! pork roast from the anime, and the short video provides visual references for the various ingredients and how they should look when they're prepared correctly. Of course, the hosts also taste their anime dish for themselves at the end, and no doubt viewers will want to try that for themselves. As for detailed recipes and directions, each Feast of Fiction Food Wars! video includes all necessary information in the video's description. To interact with the lively anime community, Feast of Fiction also encourages its viewers to share their own culinary creations with them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
