Iron Wok Jan 22
Posted: June 25, 2009 Filed under: Iron Wok Jan 1 Comment »The shark battle will forever assure Iron Wok Jan’s place at the top of my list of cooking manga, and it only gets more ridiculous and extreme in this volume.
I forgot to mention last volume that the “to be continued” page featured a room full of syringes with no context whatsoever. That’s just what kind of manga Iron Wok Jan is: it makes you try and figure out why a room full of syringes would have anything at all to do with cooking sharks.
Most of this volume is exposition to the actual judging, with just a lot of cooking going on. Jan is as ridiculous and extreme as always… he apparently stays in a freezer that is fifty below for half an hour doing something mysterious, and then promptly deep fries a live shark afterwards. He’s not looking so good when the time to judge comes, but they dig him all the same. Moreso than usual. I was really looking forward to how Oitani was going to be persuaded.
My predictions for how the scores would fall out were all wrong. I was suspecting that Kiriko and the American would be eliminated for masking the taste of shark meat rather than using it, but apparently that wasn’t a concern. Technically, though… only Jan and Koh made dishes that tasted like shark meat. Jan in particular, because even Koh mixed the flavors with other things.
And the edge-of-the-seat excitement continues as the judging goes into the next volume! I actually had to read a bit to make sure what I thought was going to happen actually occurred. Rest assured that I am once again ensnared in Iron Wok Jan’s simple, yet effective net.
[...] High School Debut (Animanga Nation) Erica Friedman on vol. 9 of High School Girls (Okazu) Connie on vol. 22 of Iron Wok Jan (Slightly Biased Manga) Connie on vol. 1 of Kimi no Todoke (Slightly Biased Manga) Noah Berlatsky [...]