Thread: Best way to level Cooking?

Apologies ahead of time: I am certain this has been asked before, but the search function isn't helping me much...

I have a SM (and kindred) Jeweler, but never leveled her cooking. I'm looking to finish that off now and could use some guidance.

With my scholar, I always leveled by making Dyes and other class consumables - likewise for other professions, there was always a relatively easy way to move up. Is there a "recommended" path to leveling my cook quickly? Types of foods to choose? Requirements or support from some of my other crafters, and if so, which? Or, just lots of gold?

Thanks so much in advance!

Find a farmer to help. With the ingredients they can farm leveling should be pretty easy and cheap. Oh I see you are on Landroval? Wellllllll ........ I just happen to have a farmer or three in that neighbourhood. Feel free to contact Phetchit, Mousebrand or Bookman in game or by mail. I'm sure we can work out a reasonable deal for some carrots and taters.
There are a few quests you will have to complete along the way of course.

The answer to your question would probably depend on what you mean by "best."

Since almost everything the Cook makes is consumable, it may be in your best interest to level up by making ingredients to be used in crafting the actual consumables later. That way you have the various components ready to go for when you're actually able to crit things.

On the other hand, if crits don't matter to you, you can just level up with the various cooked food & trail food recipes - if you have or can get your hands on the tart recipes that were distributed during the festivals, those can be a cheap-ish and valued final product to make. The only problem with the tarts is that if you do NOT have the recipes, they would probably be quite expensive to acquire on the AH right now due to scarcity. On the other hand, the spring festival is right around the corner, so you may be able to get them then if you're patient.

As Apot said previously, having either an alt or a friend Farmer will help you greatly. Many of the Cook recipes require some kind of farmed vegetable. Farming can be done rather cheaply (though it is a bit tedious) as opposed to the steep markups for farmed goods that you'll often see at the AH.

In the end though, Cook is quite the worthwhile profession to level up. It's nice to be able to supply your own food as needed as opposed to hoping you'll be able to find it when the need may arise It's also cheaper in the long run

If you have enough money to level a cook, and have a free character slot, I'd strongly recommend making a Yeoman alt to farm and cook with. Then just ignore the cooking on your Tinker.

Otherwise, you will quickly become overwhelmed trying to move farmed materials back and forth.

Myself, I leveled up the first tier, which was producing food that was useless to me at that time, by making pie crusts. It costs money but it is straightforward and you re-use the crusts in later levels. So you gain 1st tier XPs on making things useful for 2nd and 3rd tier. I recommend mastering out tier 1 this way, just pay whatever it costs. You might want to consider a discount for materials such as a house.

Then, to keep the mess low, I picked which food is useful for my characters I actually play. I usually have more health problems than power problems. I usually value agility and might most. So I get the recipes for that and then I have my farmer supply the ingredients. Do not try to make everything in parallel, your bags will blow up.

In a word: keep it simple and brute-force it.

When you are settled to be master in the tiers you need, *then* you go and make specialized food for specific characters. At that point I usually don't bother shuffling ingredients from the discounted sources as it leads to too much of a bag space and vault run mess.

Originally Posted by Darmokk

Myself, I leveled up the first tier, which was producing food that was useless to me at that time, by making pie crusts. It costs money but it is straightforward

With the recent changes, pie crusts are no longer straight forward

You have to farm Spring Barley
Clean the Barley
Mill it into Flour
Buy the rest of the ingredients
Make the pie crust

PITA now

Originally Posted by Unique

With the recent changes, pie crusts are no longer straight forward

You have to farm Spring Barley
Clean the Barley
Mill it into Flour
Buy the rest of the ingredients
Make the pie crust

PIA now

Oh. Didn't notice, I still live off the last leveling ones

Thank you for all the feedback

I actually have a yeoman already so I suppose I could just get back to that if I can remember which alt it is

I actually didn't realize my yeoman had cooking as part of her professions.

Epic /facepalm

Thank you again!

Since they changed the flour, maybe get your farmer to farm lots of barley of different tiers for your cook. You can make flour which you'll use quite a bit of. I haven't leveled a cook since the patch, but making flour should help you on your way with points. Then, you can make ingredients to finish maxing the tiers out. Especially when you get to tier 3+, ingredients can be used quite a bit for guild items, relics and recipes.


(I agree with Missy - it's a PITA the way the flour works now >.<)

Originally Posted by Doronlas

Since they changed the flour, maybe get your farmer to farm lots of barley of different tiers for your cook. You can make flour which you'll use quite a bit of. I haven't leveled a cook since the patch, but making flour should help you on your way with points. Then, you can make ingredients to finish maxing the tiers out. Especially when you get to tier 3+, ingredients can be used quite a bit for guild items, relics and recipes.


(I agree with Missy - it's a PITA the way the flour works now >.<)

This is a VERY good point. With the change in V3B1 you can literally make tons of flour which you can use later, when you can crit your recipes. You can also make ingredients faster than you can make consumable foods so the process will be quicker (I've also sold a bit of flour on the AH for a decent return on the investment).

I have a guild cook I'm working on now (just hit Artisan) so I will definitely go down this path. Also, level up your farmer. It's probably the easiest and cheapest skill to work on...but it does take a while and is dreadfully dull.

The "easiest" way now (least amount of gathering and combines) would be to either make flour, or to make campfire kits....since every tier has a recipe now, just use your forester to gather a ton of wood and go to town

Originally Posted by Doronlas

(I agree with Missy - it's a PITA the way the flour works now >.<)

I saw my PITA typo but as I had already been quoted I thought I could slip one by ya'll hehe

Originally Posted by Mykkul

The "easiest" way now (least amount of gathering and combines) would be to either make flour, or to make campfire kits....since every tier has a recipe now, just use your forester to gather a ton of wood and go to town

Ohhh I hadn't thought about campfires - good point.

Originally Posted by alibutterfly82

if you have or can get your hands on the tart recipes that were distributed during the festivals, those can be a cheap-ish and valued final product to make.

Everything above Strawberry Tart isn't cheapish any more. They all use flours, which add to the nuisance factor, while Raspberry Tart and Blackberry Tart now require pie filling instead of raw berries - that's two Cup of Fresh Cream per tart. As a result of this driving the cost up and other recipes dropping in cost (mostly due to flour changes), the Artisan and Master tarts are now the most expensive items for their tiers.

Approximate cost to make Lembas: 5s 19c
Approximate cost to make Raspberry/Blackberry tarts: 5s 59c

I'm sorry to see them go - they were always a no-brainer to make before, now there's little reason to make them at all.

I now ran out of my pre-change stock of pie crusts and had to go farm barley. As people mentioned, this changes everything.

Previously, it was a strong advantage to have cook and farmer separately and a discounted vendor somewhere. So that you can stock up at the discounted vendor and hold the stock of bought ingredients in your bags - which isn't possible if you want to farm with the same character (yeoman).

Now all that shifts. The discounted vendor is less important and the farmer is more important. It is more feaseable to forget about discounts, only buy what you need (while cooking, from the vendor at the over), have the same character run around between superiour fields and superiour oven and vendor-trash unused seeds and poor crops.

I could imagine switching my tinker to a yeoman now. Never can have enough farmers, no?

The way I levelled up cook was to make beer/ale and just vendor it (it has no useful in-game benefit). You'll need to farm barley, hops and some kind of berry for certain tiers, and you'll need to buy water and yeast, so levelling by making beer/ale is a complete money-sink.

One way to look at levelling up a cook is to look for recipies that have multiple steps for the cook. While it is time consuming, every time your cook has to process an ingredient they earn crafting xp, so the more steps they have to perform to make one finished product, the more crafting xp they earn for each finished product. The more points you earn per item, the fewer items you need to make to level up that tier of the craft.

Would just like to thank all of you for your advice here. I decided to level my non-crafting LM as a Yeoman and am leveling both farming and cooking together. I'm on Artisan tier for both, which is probably slow - but at least I can farm for anything I need to level my cook. I basically haven't left the Shire for two days

Thanks again

Edit - completed SM for both cook and farmer in 3 days. Still working on Kindred for cook.

Similar situation here. My main is schoolar and has his farming mastered (sold everyting on AH and gave to kinnies tho) and now I want to use his farming to level my tinker's cooking.

What I'm really looking for (and I'm looking everywhere, not just here) is for a leveling GUIDE where it'll tell me exactly how many food of each tier would be necessary to level each tier to mastery (not taking crits on components into count) using farming as resource. I cant even find one that uses money as resource.

If anyone knows about one, please link it here? If I get no answer I think I'll do a guide myself and post here (can't believe that NO ONE did something like that before -_-')

Originally Posted by Farian

Similar situation here. My main is schoolar and has his farming mastered (sold everyting on AH and gave to kinnies tho) and now I want to use his farming to level my tinker's cooking.

What I'm really looking for (and I'm looking everywhere, not just here) is for a leveling GUIDE where it'll tell me exactly how many food of each tier would be necessary to level each tier to mastery (not taking crits on components into count) using farming as resource. I cant even find one that uses money as resource.

If anyone knows about one, please link it here? If I get no answer I think I'll do a guide myself and post here (can't believe that NO ONE did something like that before -_-')

I did this. It is stolen and fleshed out from another post:

Cook
T1 - Farm and make Spring Barley Flour - the whole tier, you will need it for pie crusts
for a long time.
600 points
Need: 300 Bundle of Spring Barley(you will need 48 more for T5 pie crusts)
Make: 150 Cups of Spring Barley Flour (Will need 24 more for T5 pie crusts)

T2 - Any of the Fortifying soups - This tiers recipe grants 10 points (later ones do not)
840 points
Need: 120 yellow onions
Make: 60 Bowl of Coney Stock, and 60 Onion Stew

T3 - Hearty Onion Soup - This tiers recipe grants 10 points (later ones do not) I did onion because you can hand it in for Eglain rep
1080 points
Need: 78 green onions, 78 yellow onions and 78 taters
Make: 78 Hearty Stock and 78 Hearty Onion Soup

T4 - Farm and make Winter Barley Flour - the whole tier, you will need it for a long
time.
1320 points
Need: 660 Bundle of Winter Barley
Make: 330 Cup of Winter Barley Flour

T5 - Perfect pie uses the pie crusts from level 1 plus blackberries and cream for 10 points.
1560 points
Need: 87 pie crust and 174 Bunches of Blackberries
Make: 87 Blackberry Pie Filling and 87 Perfect pie

T6 - Bowl of Water or Red Tea. Bowl of Water is cheap to make Red Tea is more useful.
1800 points
Need: 300 Bundle of mint(or tea) Leaves
Make: 300 Bowl of Water(or Cup of Red Tea)

This is priceless, thank you!

i did this and found that I had way more hearty onion soup than i needed to get kindred with the eglain, but i figured that planting cauliflower and making malthom society rep items should be a better option, if you find yourself getting almost all of your rep for the eglain from quests/GA

Hi there,

I haven't really been on except to buy a couple upgrades for my account in the past 2 years.

When I was on before tarts where the best way to level cooking, but the guide several posts above this shows that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

I recall that the Raspberry and Blackberry tart recipes were pretty expensive even back then, and I think I still have them in vault. I might as well auction them and use the cash to level up cooking as above.

Anyone have an idea what Raspberry and Blackberry tart recipes auction for these days? There doesn't seem to be any way to see the 'last 5' sales or anything, and the few I see listed are kinship sales for a couple silver each.

Thanks for any advice you may have,

Force

Originally Posted by Halthon

T6 - Bowl of Water or Red Tea. Bowl of Water is cheap to make Red Tea is more useful.
1800 points
Need: 300 Bundle of mint(or tea) Leaves
Make: 300 Bowl of Water(or Cup of Red Tea)

I think your ratio might be wrong here; dont you need 600 Bundles of Tea Leaves for 300 Cups of Tea?

Originally Posted by Halthon

I did this. It is stolen and fleshed out from another post:

Spectacularly useful. Blitzed my yeoman through tiers 1 to 6 in a matter of hours, whilst spending a Sunday doing chores and housework. Just Westfold and the Guild to go now!

Originally Posted by Halthon

T1 - Farm and make Spring Barley Flour - the whole tier, you will need it for pie crusts
for a long time.
600 points
Need: 300 Bundle of Spring Barley(you will need 48 more for T5 pie crusts)
Make: 150 Cups of Spring Barley Flour (Will need 24 more for T5 pie crusts)

T2 - Any of the Fortifying soups - This tiers recipe grants 10 points (later ones do not)
840 points
Need: 120 yellow onions
Make: 60 Bowl of Coney Stock, and 60 Onion Stew

T3 - Hearty Onion Soup - This tiers recipe grants 10 points (later ones do not) I did onion because you can hand it in for Eglain rep
1080 points
Need: 78 green onions, 78 yellow onions and 78 taters
Make: 78 Hearty Stock and 78 Hearty Onion Soup

T4 - Farm and make Winter Barley Flour - the whole tier, you will need it for a long
time.
1320 points
Need: 660 Bundle of Winter Barley
Make: 330 Cup of Winter Barley Flour

T5 - Perfect pie uses the pie crusts from level 1 plus blackberries and cream for 10 points.
1560 points
Need: 87 pie crust and 174 Bunches of Blackberries
Make: 87 Blackberry Pie Filling and 87 Perfect pie

T6 - Bowl of Water or Red Tea. Bowl of Water is cheap to make Red Tea is more useful.
1800 points
Need: 300 Bundle of mint(or tea) Leaves
Make: 300 Bowl of Water(or Cup of Red Tea)

Thanks for this great list, was very helpfull. Do you also seem to have a list for the last 2 tiers? 7 and 8?

Originally Posted by Tibery

Thanks for this great list, was very helpfull. Do you also seem to have a list for the last 2 tiers? 7 and 8?

T7 - 174 Bags of Roasted Coffee grounds => 174 Cups of Second Breakfast (Recipe should be on the AH)
T8 - 228 Bags of East. Coffee grounds => 228 Cups of East. Coffiee

Prolly the most straight forward method. Coffee beans are cheap off the ah, farmers need alot of coffee crops for the special coffee beans.