Iron Wok Jan

Not sure if I've covered this before (that is the peril of being long running) but have recently started to read Iron Wok Jan again.

For those of you not familiar with this series, its a cooking manga that focuses on uber jerk Jan Akiyama and his rivalry with the Gobancho Chinese restaurant.  Though the issues that I have the rivalry is between the super critic Otani and both the Gobancho and Akiyama families in one big Chinese food cook off. Indeed the earliest anthology I have is volume 14 where Nitani brings in a talented french chef to cook a next level goose dish and challenges Jan, Kiriko Gobancho and Celine to match it, whilst dressed as pigs before a live TV audience.

This is one of the reasons why I like this the other is that its super detailed about food and such.  Things will be added in footnotes about what such and such is and what style its cooked in.  I learned about chinese seasoning and Yuzu, as well as an epic way to steam fish. That was incidentally Jan's battle vs a hemostatic cooker a type of souped up Microwave and the chef with it.

As the books themselves are now out of print, (I have a few picked up cheap from Forbidden Planet years back, in fact this is where I first encountered it) and are not cheap, I've put a link up in the first paragraph to the first 7 books on line that you can read for free, ironically its none that I actually own, but if demand is strong, I would consider scanning what I have (Volume 14, 18, and 20,21 and one or two more) and putting them up on dropbox or archive. org.