Breath of the Wild - Everything You Need To Know About Cooking Recipes

Cooking up delicious meals is just one of the new features of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. As you gain hearts and encounter even more dangerous locations, you’ll need to stay stocked-up on enhanced food stuffs. Every area features new and unique cooking ingredients, and throwing items together results in improved healing items that add resistances and buffs.

There’s so many ingredients, it’s tough to keep track of all the effects. Here, we’re going to list everything you need to know about cooking in Breath of the Wild — what materials fit into what categories, and what recipes can do for you.

The Complete Cooking Guide

Recipes all depend on the category of your ingredients, there are 11 categories of ingredient, and many materials will fall into these categories. To create a recipe, you’ll need to combine multiple ingredients.

How to Cook – All the Basics
1. Find a cooking pot. If there isn’t a fire beneath a cooking pot, you’ll need to light it before you can begin cooking recipes.
2. Recipes consist of up to 5 materials that are combined to create a recipe. Meat, fish, and plants found by hunting / scavenging in the environment can create a variety of recipes when combined.
3. To add special enhanced effects to a recipe, combine special ingredients that fall into one of the 11 categories.
  - For example:
  - Raw Meat + Hyrule Bass = Meat and Seafood Fry (No special enhancement)
  - Spicy Peppers + Raw Meat + Hyrule Bass = Spicy Meat and Seafood Fry (+Cold Resistance)
4. The visual appearance / particular name of the recipe doesn’t actually matter. The quality of ingredients and the special ingredient is all that matters.
  - Only one category of ingredient can be added to a recipe — only one status enhancing prefix.

That’s a basic overview of cooking, but the real question is, what ingredients improve your recipes? For quick-reference, here are all the categories available.

How Critical Success Works:

NOTE: While cooking, you will sometimes get a “Critical Success” when cooking. This adds one of five randomly generated bonus effects to your dish.

+1 Tier Upgrade to Status Effect
+1 Yellow Extended Heart
+3 Bonus Heart Healing
+5 Minute Status Effect Duration
+40% Stamina Overcharge

The Status Effect Categories:

Ingredients can be stacked to increase the strength of the status effect. Add multiples of the same ingredient to get stronger recipes.

Chilly: Provides extreme hot weather resistance.
Electro: Temporarily blocks electricity.
Enduring: Adds bonus stamina bar.
Energizing: Restores stamina.
Fireproof: Temporarily blocks flame.
Hasty: Increases movement speed.
Hearty: Restores all hearts and adds bonus hearts.
Mighty: Increases attack strength.
Sneaky: Increases stealth, lowers chances of being spotted.
Spicy: Provides extreme cold weather resistance.
Tough: Increases defense, take less damage from enemy attacks.

Always check your ingredients to see what effects they have. Those effects can be shared and increased with cooking. Almost any ingredients will create a recipe.

Roasting Vs. Cooking

Why cook when you can roast? There’s a difference — cooked items are placed in special cooking pots. Any item can be roasted over fire. All you have to do is select the food item from your inventory and toss it into the fire.

Roasting Pros and Cons
- Pro: Roasting food will increase heart healing by 50%.
- Con: Any status effect boost will be removed.

Roasted food is also slightly more valuable than non-roasted, and roasted food cannot be used when cooking recipes. If you need more health fast, find a fire and toss your food in for a quick healing item boost, but don’t expect to create fine recipes with the results.

Need to know more about cooking in Breath of the Wild? Ask questions below and we’ll offer answers fast.

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