Handmade Seto-yaki ceramics bring a touch of wild class to your manga-inspired meals.

In recent years, certain anime studios have earned a reputation for the mouthwatering food that appears within their works. Studio Ghibli is the best-known example, with their in-anime food so captivating viewers that there’s even a cookbook that teaches you how to make it.

But regardless of who’s drawing it, there’s a general consensus among fans that “manga meat” always looks delicious. The depiction of a hunk of cylindrical meat on a gigantic bone that can serve as both cooking skewer and handle when eating speaks to something primal and near-universal in our gastronomic spirit, and now there’s a way to bring manga meat off the comic page and into your real-world kitchen.

The Manga Meat Bone, or Manga Niku no Hone, to use its Japanese name, is a ceramic bone made in the Seto-yaki style. Seto is a town in Aichi Prefecture that’s considered one of the “Six Ancient Kilns,” historical centers of Japanese pottery culture and tradition.

Handmade by Seto artisans, the Manga Meat Bone is convincingly realistic, with its complex contours and matte glaze. It can be used in/with ovens, microwaves, steamers, barbecues, and boiling pots – pretty much everything except a deep fryer. Among the ideas the designers suggest are wrapping slices of beef or pork around the Manga Meat Bone, thrusting it through a large piece of meat, and pressing ground meat to form a meatloaf around it.

The 26-centimeter (10.2-inch) long Manga Meat Bone can even be used for non-carnivorous culinary creations, such as breads and cakes, as shown in the top-right and bottom-left photos here.

It makes for a dramatic presentation no matter how you use it, but it looks especially decadent when a little kid is eating directly from the Manga Meat Bone.

▼ There’s now a greater-than-50-percent chance that these guys are going to try to become the King of the Pirates when they grow up.

The Manga Meat Bone comes in two colors, a stark white, or a shaded “natural” tone.

With extended use, the Manga Meat Bone will take on a more weathered look, but this is an intentional part of the design, for greater realism.

One thing to be aware of is that, since the Manga Meat Bone is earthenware, before using it for the first time you’re supposed to give it one last treatment to close up the clay’s pores. To do so, place the bone in a pot with leftover water from washing rice, bring the water to a boil, then quickly turn the heat down to low for 15 to 20 minutes, then remove the bone from the water and let it air cool and dry.

The Manga Meat Bone is available online from Amazon, Rakuten, SmaSmaSweets, and Yahoo! Shopping, with prices starting at 5,500 yen (US$43). Just make sure not to get it mixed up with the gigantic manga meat barbells at the real-world One Piece gym in Tokyo.

Source, images: PR Times
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