Prepare authentic Japanese food with Cookpad’s top 25 recipes

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Washoku-Cookpad

We mentioned Japanese recipe portal Cookpad in our previous post 5 Internet services Japanese women can’t do without. With over 10 years of history since its launch way back in 1998, Cookpad perhaps is one of the most successful tech companies here in Japan with over 32 million users 1

Cookpad launched an English version of its website back in August, and after about four months of operation it now includes 8,000 recipes, attracting Japanese food fans from all over the world. In addition to the growing fan base of the English site, very recently, Japanese cuisine (or ‘washoku’) was granted UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage designation. To respond to the growing needs of washoku fans in the world, the company has now launched a special section called What is Washoku?

The page introduces the top 25 classic homecooked dishes selected from the 1.59 million recipes in Cookpad’s database. The site adds one recipe to this list per day, and so far has five recipes available for viewing, such as how to make a good dashi broth, or cooking white rice using a pot instead of a rice cooker. The remaining 20 recipes are listed, accessible as they are added/linked through the month.

Japanese cuisine is growing in popularity in many countries with over 55,000 Japanese restaurants overseas. This number has doubled in the past three years. And many of these Japanese restaurants are operated without any involvement from Japanese people. Thanks to Cookpad with the basics to traditional Japanese cuisine at hand, people can enjoy such authenticity in the comfort of their own home as well.

For those of you who are up to the challenge of cooking Japanese food, you might check out Cookpad’s Facebook page for a steady stream of tips as well.


  1. Current as of April 2013.