When you’re exploring the great expanses of Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom, you’ll no doubt fill your pockets with all sorts of trinkets and treats. A bushel of Apples, a handful of Chickaloo Tree Nuts, and bags full of Stamella Shrooms. So much so, by the end of your adventure, you’ll have more than even a whole village could eat!
However, if you’re just eating these ingredients raw, you’ll burn through half your stock during a single boss fight. Instead, find a fireplace with a study cooking pot and prepare yourself a banquet before your battles and you’ll fall in love with ToTK’s cooking system.
How To Cook In Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The few steps required to cook in Tears of the Kingdom are somewhat like in reality:
- First, you’ll need to find a cooking pot over a burning campfire. It’s no good if you find one in the rain, nor a campfire without a pot (as you can’t add one). You’ll find them among ruins, surrounded by travellers or even monsters, but every stable and village has a cooking pot just waiting for Link to use it.
- Open your inventory and select some ingredients to hold. Unless you’re making a meal like Creamy Heart Soup (or your pantry is especially sparse), you’ll want to avoid using ingredients with different bonus effects in the same meal. For example, your Might Banna and Hydromelon Fruit salad bowl will only give either the attack bonus or the cooling effect, but not both.
- Hold near the campfire and press A to cook. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be treated to an animation of your food bouncing and boiling around in the pot alongside a cute jingle. If you’re feeling restless, you can also press X to skip the animation and dig into your hard-earned dinner.
Best Recipes
Baked And Roasted
Meats, mushrooms and of course fruits can all be flambéed by a naked flame when you’re out in the wilderness without a cooking pot in sight. Excluding herbs, whenever you drop an ingredient into a fire (or even just the burning wastes of Death Mountain), it will begin to smoke, burn and eventually transform into a baked good. The upside of this is it doubles the healing of the ingredient and can be done anywhere as long as you have a fire source. The downside is that any bonuses like stamina regeneration or increased attack power won’t be given.
Hearty Ingredients
Truffles, bass, salmon, snails, durian and the best of all, radishes, come in the “Hearty” variety. What this means is when you cook them you’ll get temporary hearts from the resulting dish. You might wonder “isn’t that the same for all ingredients?”, and rightly so. But a dish that gives Temporary Hearts not only fills out your health to your maximum, but it’s so potent that Link overflows with well-being and gains extra yellow hearts on top of this. For our brittle buddy this is an endlessly useful boon for his battle against the baddies of Hyrule. So, capture any wandering blue snails and lizards, truffle hunt among the trunks of the forest’s trees, and keep an eye out for the pink, flowering stalks of Hearty Radishes.
Hasty Elixirs & Dishes
Even with a trusty steed, Link spends a lot of time running around on foot– Running under the desert sun, in the freezing cold and at full sprint away from bothersome enemies. There is a miracle cure for all these ailments: The Hasty Elixir. Pair a couple Hot-Footed Frogs or Hightail Lizards with your highest quality monster parts and you’ll have a potent, long-lasting concoction that’ll help Link run and climb with greater speed and agility. But if you’re looking for the ultimate Hasty dish, fry these greens: 2x Fleet-Lotus Seeds, 1x Swift Carrot, 1x Swift Violet, and for a thirty-minute effect add the shard of a dragon’s horn.
Endura & Tireless ingredients
If Link isn’t running, he’s likely climbing. Stamella Shrooms and Restless Crickets may work in a pinch, but Endura Carrots, Endura Shrooms and the rain-loving Tireless Frogs are the number one ingredients you want for mountaineering. Why? Because a single one can fill your stamina bar and then some. So instead of cooking a great gumbo of this powerful produce, take one, cook it, and do it again until you’re pleasantly packed. So, whenever you see that Link is holding on to the wall by the tip of his pinky, give him a moment to enjoy some Salt-Grilled Greens or Veggie Rice Balls, and he’ll feel completely recharged.
Fireproof Elixir
When Link emerges from his hundred-year slumber and surveys the new Hyrule, a few major landmarks stand out. The first is of course Hyrule Castle, but beyond that is a foreboding volcano, spewing a plume of black smoke: Death Mountain. If you want to visit this lovely landmark, you’ll need more than just heat resistant clothes or icy treats, you’ll need to become fireproof. At the volcano’s basecamp, Foothill Stable, you may buy up to three Fireproof Elixirs from Gaile. Once you’ve begun your ascent, you’ll need to capture the Fireproof Lizards or Smotherwing Butterflies to brew more. For most places in the Eldin Mountains, one level of Flame Guard will be enough– so toss just one of these critters into the pot with a generous handful of monster parts. Rarely, you’ll need two levels of Flame Guard, for this add another critter and you’ll be free to enjoy the volcanic vistas.
Mighty Simmered Fruit
Sometimes, you’re fighting a gang of bokoblins and you’re down to the Boko Club you nabbed while one of them was taking a dirt nap. Thankfully there’s a solution: Mighty Bananas (or Razorshroom, Mighty fish, and Razorclaw Crabs). What you get when cooking these is a dinner that’ll increase the damage that you dole out. So, visit Faron to pluck the fresh plantains right off the plant and get cooking. Five Mighty Bananas are enough for a level three attack boost, which amounts to an excellent fifty percent more damage. Just know that’s not going to add up too much when you’re swinging around a Tree Branch.
