What are Blasta Books?
Blasta Books are to cookbooks what street food is to restaurants: they give people a fun, affordable, accessible way to eat exciting food.
At €15 per book and limited to 30 or so recipes, every recipe in the Blasta Books series will be a tried-and-tested winner. The brief for our authors is simple: every recipe has to be blasta – it has to be really damn delicious, the kind of recipes that go viral and get the whole country cooking.
How are Blasta Books different from other cookbooks?
Hardcover, small format and illustrated by Dublin artist Nicky Hooper, the books will be released four times a year as a quarterly series.
Each volume is a standalone 72-page A5 cookbook, but as a collectible series they will also provide a more inclusive snapshot of Ireland’s modern and diverse food culture, from tacos to tapas, spice bags to sushi. They are little books with big voices.
Food + stories = connection
There are two things that connect absolutely everyone: food and stories. More people need to be able to share their food and by extension their story, which is why Blasta Books will initially prioritise new, previously unpublished voices in Ireland.
Traditional cookbooks – the kind with 100 recipes, 250 pages and sumptuous styling and photography – are incredibly expensive to produce. What this often means is that only the most high-profile people and only the most mainstream topics or trends tend to get published. Many voices and many parts of our food culture in Ireland are just not being represented.
Publisher Kristin Jensen was convinced that there had to be another way, one that enables more voices to be heard and more niches, topics and cuisines to be explored – and that puts more fun and experimentation back in the kitchen and on the table. Inspired by Short Stack Editions from the US, the Little Leon books from the UK and the Avoca compact edition books here in Ireland, Blasta Books was born.
It’s time to make more room at the table. We’ve set a place for you.
Contact us
Find us on social media @blastabooks or email us at info@ninebeanrowsbooks.com.