There are plenty of ways to express your love of anime. Maybe you spend hours on TV show marathons, powering through seasons to get the whole story all at once. You might collect figures or plush toys, displaying the ferocity of your fandom with cool statues and poseable figures. Maybe you even indulge in an anime t-shirt or two, all of these are great ways to support and show off your favorite animes.
But have you considered cooking inspired by some of the top anime around? If you’re already donning your apron and getting the flour ready then you’re a natural-born chef, a master of the culinary arts, and you want to give your cooking and baking a flair for the dramatic and cinematic. If you’re looking for a little inspiration for your next recipe, or have a certain someone in your life who you think might enjoy a little anime dish or two, these anime cookbooks are just the way to go.
Studio Ghibli Cookbook
Gudetama: The Official Cookbook: Recipes for Living a Lazy Life
Cook more than just eggs with this recipe book inspired by the lazy antics of Gudetama. There are details on how to make everything from pancakes, to quesadillas, too even spaghetti carbonara, all with a lazy meter to gauge how much effort you want to put into your meals.
Not everyone is going to be an expert chef, or should we say, an eggs-pert chef? If you’re a little more relaxed when it comes to your cooking, you might want to check out the Gudetama: The Official Cookbook. This illustrated cookbook celebrates the lazier side of cooking, ditching the more difficult recipes for fun and simple meals, with a focus on making you feel the coziest you can.
It’s not all eggs in this cookbook either, though there are plenty of eggy recipes to try out. There’s the bacon blanket recipe, a tasty morning wakeup recipe that has you draping your eggs with a couple of slices of soft bacon. Then there’s the ‘Souper Sleepy Instant Ramen’, which have you take a basic ramen dish and spice it up with some kimchi, veggies, some meat, and an egg.
There’s a healthy instance of making sure you don’t stress yourself out with this cookbook, encouraging you to use whatever you have available to you rather than making you have all the proper ingredients. There are 60 recipes in this cookbook, giving you a healthy variety of recipes to try out, each one with a ‘lazy meter’ to let you know their difficulty before getting started.
My Pokémon Baking Book: Delightful Bakes Inspired by the World of Pokémon
Take your Pokemon adventures with you with a whole cookbook devoted to delicious pastries, tarts, deserts, and more. This baking-focused book is light on meals but has dishes inspired by Pokemon from all different regions of the anime.
Baking tasty treats has been a longtime tradition in the Pokemon series. Starting with the former gym leader Brock, cooking up all sorts of tasty treats for his Pokemon and trainer friends. This cook book focuses on baking, bringing all sorts of confections and deserts inspired by the various regions and the Pokemon that inhabit them.
This cookbook has more than fifty recipes, bringing treats from every from Kanto to Paldea. The recipes in this cookbook does a fantastic job at breaking down everything you need, including what equipment each recipe needs to get going, and even breaking the recipe up into various sections for you so you know exactly what each step needs.
You get recipes like a Bidof inspired Peanut Butter Pretzel Tart, and a Mint Mocha Cake with little Yamper hearts all over it. Of all the recipes in this book, the Sprigatito Pistachio Rose Rolls sound the best to try.
Food Wars! ‘Shokugeki No Soma’ Cookbook
An unofficial cookbook based on the scandalous cooking anime Food Wars!, this book has all sorts of recipes inspired directly by the show. The meals will be amazing, just probably not as good as the show makes them look.
One of the more unique cooking anime around, Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma brings some very intense recipes to the anime world, with some surprising results for those who eat it. While you likely won’t be cooking anything nearly as intense as what’s show in the anime, there’s still plenty of really cool recipes here.
The Food Wars! cookbook is a little light on the total number of recipes, with only 37 in the book, but there are some very cool dishes to serve up. You get Saumon Confit Flamme, a dish made by Rentarō Kusunoki during the Survivors' Purge that makes use of salmon, bacon, berries, and cilantro. The cookbook is a bit more procedural than what you might expect from a cookbook, but if you enjoy the step-by-step process of cooking, you’ll feel right at home.
The Way of the Househusband: The Gangster’s Guide to Housekeeping
Improving your cooking comes hand in hand with improving your home life, and the Way of the Househusband can help you with both. There’s tips for keeping your house clean and in order, while making the most of your day, as well as giving you a great meal to end the day with.
Part cookbook, part self-help home guide, The Way of the Househusband: the Gangster’s Guide to Housekeeping brings a wholesome, but incredibly intense attitude to getting things done around the house and having a meal ready with ease.
In this book, Tatsu, the best househusband around, gives you pointers to living a clean and healthy life with tips inspired by him and his antic in the manga. Among them are 25 recipes for tasty dishes to make for yourself and your loved ones. Meals here include a recipe for a bread loaf pizza au gratin, honey lemon chicken sandwiches, and a star anise chicken soup.
My Pokémon Cookbook
Pokemon has never looked as tasty as they do in this Pokemon inspired cookbook. While the recipes don’t have you serving up your favorite Pokemon, you can take everything from rice balls to donuts and make them look like Pokemon.
Another Pokemon cookbook to check out, this one is more dedicated to all sorts of meals, and not just deserts. There’s a good amount of recipes here that range in size from light snacks to packable lunches, and even full-on dinners.
The book is broken down into various regions, letting you pick and choose different recipes based on various Pokemon from different areas. This cookbook does a great job of making sure to give alternatives for allergies or if you’re looking for gluten-free or lactose-free diets. Some of the recipes include a spicy Charizard arrabbiata and a spinach mushroom burger inspired by Eldegoss.
Not a single person on the planet who has ever watched a Studio Ghibli film and not wanted to eat everything on screen (except for maybe in Spirited Away). With this cookbook, you too can make some of those delicious dishes.
If you’ve ever watched a Studio Ghibli production, you know that they have some of the tastiest, mouthwatering food in anime. While an unofficial cookbook, these recipes seek to capture the look, feel, and imagined taste from movies like My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princes Mononoke, and more.
This cookbook is a little light on recipes, with 23 recipes in total, though it does give a healthy mix of meals and deserts, across a wide range of skill levels to help verify any chef can jump right in. At the start of each recipe there’s a little breakdown about the dish and how it relates to the specific film it is from.
The Howl’s Moving Castle dish is a simple bacon and egg, from the scene where the cursed Sophie is making a tasty-looking breakfast for the aloof wizard. But so long as you’re following the recipe here, you won’t have any burnt bacon.
One Piece: Pirate Recipes
Sanji took a break from his search for the All-Blue to jot down some of his favorite recipes from One Piece. With all sorts of recipes ranging from pies to sandwiches, you can bet you’ll never go hungry again.
There’s so much cooking in the pirate-centric manga One Piece that a cookbook around one of the biggest animes in the world seems like a natural fit. The resident chef of the Thousand Sunny, Sanji, has dedicated his life to being the best cook on the open seas and has brought all his recipes together in one book to share with you.
This cookbook is unique as it’s told as both an instructional guide as if Sanji himself was showing you how to cook, and with little editorial tidbits from series creator Eiichiro Oda. The recipes in this book come with trivia about who the recipe is for, such as meat on the bone, which is Luffy’s favorite dish, and little tidbits about different recipes and what inspired them.
The cherry pie recipe comes from Mock Town, a small village that Luffy and the Straw Hat gang visit right before they go to Skypiea, and even shows Luffy eating with Blackbeard before he became one of the Four Emperors. The recipes in this book are very accurate and might require you to have a cooking scale on hand, but still make for an amazing time for that special One Piece fan in your life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Cookbooks Worth Buying?
They absolutely are! Cookbooks come with the knowledge that these recipes have been tested and vetted by other chefs. They also are direct and straight to the point, especially in a world where cooking websites can often be bogged down with lots of extras.
What Are Some Cooking Anime?
There are plenty of anime based on cooking, and not just the ones for cookbooks we have here. There’s the isekai anime Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill, Food Wars!, and Restaurant to Another World.
Who Is The Greatest Cook In Anime?
While you likely won’t find that all fans agree, Sanji from One Piece is on a journey to become the best chef by finding the All-Blue. Soma Yukihira from Food Wars! is also on a journey of self discovery to become the best he can be at his craft.
