Roast Pork, Just Kidding is the first dish to appear on the show, and it gives us a taste (pun intended) of what the rest of the show will offer as the stakes get raised higher. The dish is an improvised one on Soma’s part, created on a whim to fend off the greedy developer Yaeko Minegasaki from taking over the land that the restaurant is on to develop her projects. She had sabotaged his food storage of all its meat, preventing him from winning her bet of producing anything that she wanted, of which she had demanded a pork dish.

However, the crafty Soma had a plan. The very same morning, he had bought a packet of bacon and the vegetables of the store remained unspoilt. Using mashed potatoes, Soma created a centre that he then wrapped bacon around and toasted in an oven. Through some culinary trickery, he had made it seem like he had roasted an entire pork and presented it to them. Won over by the fantastic food, they soon left him and the store alone.

This particular dish stands at the forefront of the list to not only give you a taste of what the rest of this article about the top 10 Food Wars! (Shokugeki no Soma) recipes will offer, but because it is one of the most accessible dishes to make on the show. While genius in its inception based on the circumstances, the actual dish does not require a trained specialist to make, and is available to any fan of the show who can get to the nearest supermarket.

Tōtsuki Training Camp is a deadly camp designed to weed out the weakest and least enterprising of the chefs that attend the Tōtsuki Culinary Academy. Any classes that you attend, you must attain a pass at the very least or you will be kicked out of the school forever. There are no retries. It will be the end of your student life in the Academy. As such, the stage is set and the stakes are raised. In the very first class that Soma and the gang attend, they are made to find their own ingredients from their surroundings and present a passable dish.

Many students, including Soma and Megumi, resorted to catching fish as it is the nearest possible source of meat. However, Soma soon realises that it would not make their dish stand out in comparison to the other students. Using some ingenuity and quick improvisation, he realises that eggs are a resource that he can exploit from the nearby hens. Furthermore, he steals the Kaki Seeds that their instructor is munching on. By turning the seeds into batter and coating the fish to deep fry, he soon arrives with the Char Okakiage, an innovative dish with a punny name.

This dish is also another one of the more accessible recipes that exists throughout the show. It is not just innovative, it utilises cheap and common ingredients everywhere that can be easily purchased. Besides, anything made with Kaki Seeds is sure to taste great! Just imagining the way it crunches as we bite into the fish whilst savouring the soft texture underneath is enough to get our mouths watering.

Sumiredōri Shopping District is the one in which the Yukihira Diner resides. Even though the shop itself is closed and has gone on a hiatus, Soma still holds fond memories for the district. Unfortunately, it has come on some tough times due to Mozuya, a Karaage specialty shop, which has drawn countless customers away to another shopping district. In order to revitalize the shopping district, Soma draws on the help of his friends to invent a dish that can compete with Mozuya’s.

Using the sauce of the meat expert Ikumi, and the high quality chickens from her family, Soma and friends manage to create the Sumire Karaage Roll. It comprises of a roll filled with Karaage, some herbs and vegetables, as well as Ikumi’s specialty sauce. Whilst simplistic in design, that is the point. Not only is it refreshing to eat, it is easily portable, making it attractive to businessmen and students alike. The Sumire Karaage Roll represents what teamwork and friendship can bring to the table, as well as how cute Ikumi is with her crush on Soma!

The Chaplin Steak Don is the first dish made by Soma Yukihira for a Shokugeki. He and Megumi had just joined the Donburi Club, but it was set to close by Mito Ikumi on orders of Erina Nakiri. In order to prevent that from happening, he challenged her to a Shokugeki with the club and his continued tenure as a student on the line. The theme? Well it’s a challenge to make the best Donburi of course! On one end, we have Mito bringing in a whole rack of A5 beef to spice up her dish while Soma…bought supermarket super discount Sirloin steak?

While the quality of the beef he bought is discount level, he quickly uses a whole ton of minced onions to tenderize and cook the beef. This causes the beef to be as appetizing as the A5 grade beef that Mito has brought to the table. The judges quickly come to the conclusion that he is using the Chaplin cooking style to elevate the texture and flavour of the beef to new heights, allowing him to come ahead of the competition despite his cheapness. This is further complemented by the sour plum paste that he had mixed into the rice, contrasting the sweet flavour of the plums with the umami of the beef, creating a complete package. As Soma said, a don is a complete package, not separate parts joined to make a whole.

Have you ever tasted A5 quality beef? It is so expensive, yet so good at the same time. The beef itself is already good by its own. Simply grilling it and adding some salt and pepper is enough to make anyone go crazy after eating it. In conclusion, any old idiot with a pan can make good food if they have access to A5 quality beef. To surpass that using cheap store bought beef, Soma has done what every good chef is able to do; create quality food using their skills instead of relying on high quality ingredients.

In the Tōtsuki Training Camp, a single failure will lead to the expulsion of the student. Megumi, a girl that has coasted by partly due to Soma so far is faced with failure when coming head to head with Shinomiya, one of the alumni of the academy. In response, Soma challenges him to a Shokugeki. The fight is on, but with the condition that Soma can only serve as the sous chef to Megumi, as she herself must prove that she deserves her place. In the peak of her character arc, she blooms like a flower in spring and produces a dish that exemplifies the cooking style that represents her best, the Rainbow Terrine.

The Rainbow Terrine is made using common ingredients that Megumi grew up with like sun dried tomatoes and zucchinis, turned into 7 different pates. Together, they form 7 different layers of colours, almost like a rainbow. Each layer provides a different flavour altogether. In addition to the two different sauces present on the plate, it is almost as if there are 14 possible flavours that the judges can sample. This dish is dubbed by them to be very innovative and exciting. Though she eventually lost the Shokugeki, she was allowed to stay on because of the grit she showed during the challenge.

This dish is important to the show, because it represents the turning point of Megumi’s character. She goes from a useless but cute tag along of Soma’s into a chef that can stand on her own right. She eventually proceeds to compete in the annual competition of the school, so you know she definitely made it as a chef. It helps that the dish also sounds extremely delicious. While hard to achieve for the common household chef, the thought of eating something like this just gets our mouth watering!

Hayama Akira’s specialty is the many types of spices that populate the world of cooking. He can tell what is in a dish from his sense of smell alone, belaying just how knowledgeable he is on the subject. When the first rounds of the preliminaries of the Annual Tōtsuki Autumn Election was announced, the theme was set to be curry. Curry is one of those dishes that uses an enormous amount of spices to deliver an explosion of flavour to whoever is eating it. You can bet your butt that Hayama wrecked everyone in the competition with his dish!

Using the secret ingredient of Holy Basil, Hayama creates a pot pie of naan that hides the curry hidden within. When the naan was pierced by a judge, the aroma of the curry exploded outwards like a bomb, allowing even the audiences to taste just how delicious the dish was on smell alone. It was dubbed a dish that you tasted before even eating it. He definitely deserves to be known as the guy with the spices, because the taste of the curry proceeded to blow the judges away, giving him the win for the prelims.

Curry is one of those dishes that are easy to imagine but hard to prepare. Each combination of spices creates a vastly different result, whether good or bad. It takes a skilful hand to properly balance them against each other in other to produce the best result possible. What Hayama has done is just beyond extraordinary. To have an aroma so devastating that even the audiences start to feel it? That’s just a feat that only the best of chefs can achieve!

In one of the rounds preceding the finals of the Annual Totsuki Autumn Election, Soma is faced up against Subaru Mimasaka, a notorious chef that has won countless Shokugekis within the academy and taken the prized utensils of the losing chef in recompense. While he certainly has skill and innovation to match, he wins using nefarious methods. By investigating the chefs he is up against, Subaru is able to learn the recipe they will make and improve it a step further, granting him the win easily. Soma is faced with the choice of improvising during the competition or creating his recipe in secret.

Soma ends up doing both, because he is Soma Yukihira and no one can stop his rise. He ends up creating a variant of the beef stew that was copied by Subaru earlier, turning it into an arrangement of various beef parts into the style of a chikuzenni. This runs very much in the vein of the earlier mentioned Rainbow Terrine, where each part of the beef will provide a very different and exciting flavour for the eater. It was coined by the judge as an amusement park, with each beef part being a different ride.

Most of us tend to stay away from the parts of the cow that aren’t simply coined as beef or steak. That’s because the thought of eating organs or even the tongue does not sound very appetizing. In his dish, Soma uses those very parts that are thought of as gross to bring us an amusement park of a dish. It isn’t just tasty, it’s educational. Even the parts that you have to eat for nutritional value can taste good too, as long as they are in the right hands.

When Alice Nakiri finally comes to blows with Soma in the Annual Totsuki Autumn Election, the theme of their match is bentos. Choosing to take full advantage of her gastronomy specialty and the fact that bentos are usually served chilled, Alice made the Temari Bento. Her dish comprises of a variety of different sushi that must be eaten in a very specific order to fully experience the full story that it tells. Using a bunch of convoluted gastronomy techniques that we won’t even try to explain, she has the judges reeling over in delight.

Though Alice eventually lost to Soma because her dish failed to present flavours that can only be found in bentos, her dish highlights an important point of the show. The mangaka who created the story of this anime either really knows his shit, or did a lot of research. The methods that she uses in creating the Temari Bento are so mind boggling and interesting, and it really goes to show that Shokugeki no Soma really wants to present a good cooking anime for us to enjoy. Some of us may never try gastronomy, but we can live vicariously through the judges!

Coming up on the prelims of the Annual Totsuki Autumn Election, Soma is faced with the greatest challenge of his student life; to defeat the genius of spices, Hayama Akira. Having tasted the curry dish that Hayama served Megumi and Soma earlier, he is fully aware of how tough the coming challenge is when paired against not just Hayama but heavy weights like Alice and Kurokiba. In order to win the prelims and move on to the competition proper, Soma comes up with a dish very similar to Hayama’s.

Using the previous failures of Soufflé Omelette which almost got him expelled and the Apple Risotto that lost against his father’s dish, Soma invented the Curry Risotto Omurice. At first glance, it is a dish that doesn’t have much to offer. Omurice is not exactly the highest end dish in the world. It is relatively easy to make and is served in countless establishments throughout Japan. However, it uses a concept similar to that of the Naan Pot Pie Curry. When a spoon pierces the omelette, an explosion of aroma washes across the audience. It is an aroma bomb similar to the one that Hayama utilised. Needless to say, the dish itself was delicious as well with such a smell. Though he eventually lost against Hayama, Soma still secured 2nd place in the prelims. This dish is certainly one that we hope other omurice can become!

The Quail Stuffed with Risotto and Eggs ~Brazen Youngster Style~ dish is the last dish to be presented in season 2 of the anime. It is the culmination of Soma’s growth throughout his Stagiaire stint with Shino’s Tokyo. At the start of his internship, Soma struggled to even upkeep with the needs of the other chefs, failing to deliver ingredients on time or outright failing to prepare them properly for them. Don’t speak of making a noticeable change, at this rate he would be kicked out before the end.

Not one to be deterred, he stay day after day to study the many techniques of French cuisine. Eventually, he started to be steps ahead of the other chefs, preparing the ingredients that they need beforehand by anticipating their needs. On his final day, his chance to make a noticeable change came. The winner of a mini competition would get their dish added to the menu. Using all that he has learnt, he pours his all into making a Quail Stuffed with Risotto and Eggs. Though crunchy on the outside, it is soft and sweet on the inside. It fully utilises all the techniques that he has learnt during his time. Soma eventually wins and gets to stay on with the academy.

This dish represents a change that Soma has gone through during the arc. Earlier in the season, he eventually lost during the competition despite going to the finals. Though he showed no real signs of being disheartened, he came to the realisation that who he was at the moment was not enough to challenge his father. This arc highlights his drive to improve his skills and his grit as a person. The end result is this dish, a culmination of his hard work. Plus, it looks bloody delicious!