Cooking Overview

Most of this chapter is spent detailing each of the recipes, but before you go over ingredient lists and Stamina values, it’s important to understand the basics. There are three essential steps to successful cooking: 1) learning the recipe, 2) gathering the ingredients, and 3) having room in your Bag to store the dish.

Learning Recipes

For the purposes of this chapter, we limit the discussion to recipes for use in the kitchen—we cover Fertilizer and bait recipes in the fishing and farming chapters, respectively. All of the cooking recipes come from Bastian and his daughter Elise, the owners of Bastian’s Restaurant. Though some recipes are unlocked through the course of restoring the lighthouse (story events), most can be obtained either by completing requests or by purchase.

Bastian: Most recipes are available for purchase from Bastian. Talk to Bastian inside the restaurant to see which recipes are for sale. The variety of recipes he’s willing to sell increases over time, as you advance the story and seasons, build your affection, and complete requests for him. Some specific requests are rewarded for completing specific Farm to Table requests.

Elise: Though Elise provides you with an occasional specific recipe during the course of the story (i.e., Strawberry Jam), you mostly learn recipes from Elise by completing her Cuisine requests. A culinary student herself, she has several sought-after recipes she’s willing to teach you.

Only one example of a recipe is needed for you to learn all of its variants. For example, early in the game, you learn the Grilled Fish Recipe. This is really a suite of recipes that allows you to cook ten different Grilled Fish dishes, each with a different species of fish. Similarly, learning the Butter Recipe unlocks the basic version of the recipe, along with the Great, Ultimate, Supreme, and Legendary versions of the same dish.

Gathering Ingredients

Once you learn some recipes, head home and press the Action Button while standing near the stove to bring up a list of the recipes you’ve learned. The most important part of cooking is securing the necessary ingredients. Though many recipes can be made with a variety of substitute ingredients, you can usually only substitute different varieties of the same item, such as similar types of fish or different versions of a similar vegetable. If a recipe requires Carrots, you can’t substitute Broccoli. Here are some tips for making sure you can cook as many recipes as possible in a short amount of time.

• Resist the urge to sell your crops. Keep at least a dozen of each, as there’s no other way to gain many of the ingredients needed for cooking. Sell your mutated crops to Sam to unlock the seeds in his store, then refrain from selling him your produce. If you need money, head to the mine.
• Raise multiple chickens and cows throughout the first two seasons, then leave room in your upgraded Chicken Coop and Animal Barn for four Brown Chickens and three Brown Cows. You need a lot of Candy Eggs and Chocolate Milk to make the more difficult, higher-quality dishes. Feed your animals higher-quality Animal Feed and pet them each day to yield Ultimate- and Miracle-quality ingredients.
• Great=quality fruit can be difficult to come by, as not many trees yield it. Plant numerous fruit trees of each species, keep the ground around them free of rocks and trees, and give them each plenty of room. With some luck, several of your trees yield the rarer, higher-quality fruit. Never sell it!
• Stock up on cooking essentials at Bastian’s Restaurant. Buy your Salt, Sugar, and Flour in bulk, and don’t be afraid to purchase Bread and other ingredients from him. He charges a lot of money for some ingredients, but once you upgrade all of your tools, repair the buildings, and upgrade your house and barns, your mining profits can be used to stock up on baking products.

Many recipes can accept substitute ingredients. Often this is done to cook a higher-quality version of the dish. For example, many recipes that call for Cream Cheese can be made using higher-quality Cream Cheese to achieve a higher-quality dish. Other dishes, particularly Fish Cuisine, can be made using a variety of fish. The following table shows the acceptable substitutions for dishes calling for Rainbow Trout, Tilapia, and Cod.

Substitute Fish Ingredients

Managing Bag and Refrigerator Inventory

Upgrade to a Large House as fast as possible in order to gain a refrigerator that you can store ingredients in. This allows you to store an unlimited variety and quantity of food items, so you needn’t worry about not having room for the crops you harvest or fish you catch. You still need to shift ingredients from the refrigerator into your Bag in order to cook them, but you can at least store the ingredients you’re not using in the refrigerator without fear of them going bad.

As the seasons pass and your assortment of crops and other items grows more numerous, proper inventory management becomes ever more important. Consider focusing on completing all of the tool upgrades and building repairs throughout the island so you can easily store all of your lumber and ore in the dresser, thus leaving more room for cooking ingredients in your Bag. Similarly, keep all of your unused Fertilizer, feed, and bait stored in the Fertilizer Bin and Windmill to free up additional room. Keep plenty of baking essentials (Sugar, Salt, and Flour) in your inventory, and shift unneeded ingredients to the refrigerator until needed.