2025 Cookbooks in Review

The Japanese Art of Pickling and Fermenting - Cookbook

This book is incredibly gorgous, and has lots of unique recipes that are your “off the beaten track” traditional japanese picking and fermenting recipes. They range from quick pickles that can be made in less than an hour, to full 3 month long ferments.

Although the author is based in melbourne, I found that a lot of the ingredients can be a bit hard to source (e.g. unripe ume plums (where even the ripe ones can’t be bought), fresh yuzu etc…) since she has a large garden for growing japanese fruit/vegetables. You’ll still be able to do around 50% of the recipes with exact ingridents, and around 25% of the rest with substitutions.

I also recommend following her instagram @cookingwithkoji, she makes really beautiful japanese breakfasts and posts them almost every morning.

Overall Review: 4/5

• Pros: Pretty book, tasty recipes, clear instructions
• Cons: Difficult to find ingridents. Aside from the first 1/4 it is not beginner friendly

Real Japanese Cooking by Makiko Itoh - Cookbook

I got this cook book from Better Read than Dead while it was on display for it’s launch earlier this year. I interested me since it seemed to have alot of home-cooking recipes that I knew of but don’t usually see in japanese cook books. Instead of trying to create new recipes or fusion western and japanese cooking, I find that this book covers a large amount of classic japanese cooking (both traditional and modern dishes). I was really surprised to find that it ended turning into one of my most reached for cook books ever!

It’s really not being talked about much, and has disapeared from alot of bookstores after only a couple months of being released, but I still highly recommend buying it.

This is a compendium of around 600 japanese recipes that is written for people living outside of japan learning to cook japanese food. It has your basics such as info about pantry staples and simple miso soup recipes, but also manages to fit in complex recipes like japanese milk bread, growing koji mould and a whole QnA spread about troubleshooting your nukadoko pickling bed.

I found that almost every recipe had simple ingridents that were easy to find at an asian/japanese grocer and the steps are both detailed and easy to follow.

Some recipes I’ve enjoyed:

• Ogura Toast — Red bean paste on toasted japanese bread. I wouldn’t have known to put these things together as it’s so simple that it doesn’t get mentioned elsewhere.
• Tomato Ohitashi — cold tomato and savoury sauce side dish, which really brings out the salt and tomato falvour pairing

Overall Review: 5/5

• Pros: Comprehensive recipe list, clear instructions, easy to get ingridents, tasty recipes
• Cons: Doesn’t do dessert super well