REVIEW: Let's Make Ramen!: A Comic Book Cookbook (nonfiction book) by Hugh Amano and Sarah Becan

Let's Make Ramen! is a cookbook. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I'll start by saying that I haven't actually made anything from this cookbook. Also, I'm highly unlikely to ever make even half the components of a bowl of ramen from scratch. But if I ever do, this book will be the reason why.

The food illustrations and graphic novel portions are gorgeous, with rich colors and thick linework. The various bowls of ramen and other recipe illustrations made my mouth water the same way some delicious-looking Studio Ghibli meal might.

The book starts with a brief history of ramen, provides a guide for navigating a Japanese ramen-ya, includes a few pages of ramen pantry staples and cooking equipment, and then gets into recipes, starting with stocks and broths, the noodles, then meats, then accompaniments, and wrapping up with some ramen offshoot recipes like tsukemen, abura soba, mazemen, and more. There are also some tips for using a pressure cooker to speed up parts of the cooking process.

I didn't go into this thinking I'd be inspired to make an entire bowl of ramen from scratch and, honestly, these recipes underscored that. I don't have the willpower, time, freezer space, or kitchen equipment. What I might be able to manage, however, is to jazz up a bowl of cheap ramen with something from the accompaniments section. I might even figure out how to cheat on parts of the recipes at the end and make something from there, or even, if I'm feeling really fired up, make broth from scratch. It hasn't happened yet, but we'll see.

This book can be a little overwhelming at times, as it uses several Japanese words well before it defines them, and tells readers that they don't need a lot of specialty equipment while including recipes that mention a lot of specialty equipment. But you can tell that the authors really do want readers to love ramen as much as they do, and there are numerous points in the text where they reassure readers and give them tips for streamlining the cooking process and making things a little less daunting. Most of the ramen components in the first few parts of this book are assumed to be made well ahead of time, with guides as to how long they'll keep in the fridge or freezer.