Cooking: A Beginner's Guide

Cooking is a secondary skill, so it does not count towards your two profession limit.

Cooking is a great skill for any character due to the wide variety of foods that can be made. Crafted food has unique buffs that vendor food does not have, which makes it highly desirable for low level adventurers and end-game raiders alike. Most buffs are in the form of a "well-fed" bonus that will increase some of your stats for up to 60 minutes. Cooking is practically a must-have for melee characters because of their increased down time, unless you just like wasting extra money on vendor food. With Cooking you can save your gold and make food out of the junk you would normally sell to a vendor.

There are classes that particularly benefit from Cooking skill, such as Hunters, Warlocks and Rogues. A hunter always needs extra food for his pet, so Cooking can give you a cheap way to provide that. Hunters and Warlocks can both benefit from special foods that will apply handy buffs to your pet. And rogues have a special recipe called Thistle Tea that instantly restores energy during combat. But truly, all classes can take advantage of the myriad of stat boosts that are available through crafted foods.

If you decide to try your hand at Cooking, the first thing you'll want to do is find a trainer. The easiest way to accomplish this is to ask a guard while you're in the city. In addition to telling you the name of a Cooking trainer you'll also get a handy pointer on your mini-map. Once you find your trainer, make sure you grab any recipes he has for you, so you'll have some variety starting out.

The easiest way to level Cooking with minimal fuss is to go out and adventure. As you kill mobs, save the bits that can be cooked. Items with a white name are related to tradeskills and/or quests, so save these when you can. When you come back to town to empty your bags, just find a nice big fire at your local inn. Once you have all your ingredients ready you simply stand near the fire, select the recipe you want, click your Cooking button and 'Create All'!

As noted above, Cooking does require a fire of some sort, but luckily there are many places with fires available. Most towns have a fire or stove of some sort inside of the buildings, or sometimes a bonfire outside. While you are adventuring you may notice campfires where mobs have congregated. All of these fires can be used for Cooking. You can even use the many braziers in Ironforge. If you don't have a fire handy, you can make your own fire by clicking the Basic Campfire button in your spellbook. This ability enables you to build a fire and cook anywhere you like.

There are a number of quests that will provide you with free recipes, so by not using cooking you are missing out on fun items such as the Gooey Spider Cake and the Curiously Tasty Omelet. Here are a list of the recipes you can get from quests in Azeroth:

As you can see there are quite a few recipes out there for the taking. My favorite way to skill up Cooking on a low level character is to hang out in Darkshore. The coast of Darkshore is crawling with crabs that range from level 9 all the way up to level 21. They are not aggressive, so as long as you avoid the occasional group of murlocs you can grind at least ten levels without fear. They drop a decent amount of greens and you'll also end up with a good number of Small Lustrous Pearls that are used in several other tradeskills. This method is obviously more appropriate for Alliance folks.

The benefit to leveling your Cooking this way is that the crabs drop all sorts of parts that can be used for multiple recipes starting with Boiled Clams at 50 skill, Crab Cake at 75, Cooked Crab Claw at 85, and Clam Chowder at 90. The first two recipes can be learned from the Cooking trainer in Darnassus and the Clam Chowder recipe is sold by the fisherman in Darkshore (he hangs out by the beach a bit south of Auberdine). Unfortunately the Crab Claw recipe is only sold by the Master Cook in Stormwind, so you can either save your crab claws for when you can get over there, or buy it before you head for Kalimdor. For the most part this is a relaxing way to hit level 20 and get your Cooking over 100 at the same time. Darkshore has a wide variety of interesting quests too, if you want to take a break from the grind.

You may notice that a good number of recipes are for fish. Fishing is a great companion skill for Cooking, as it provides more than enough materials for gaining Cooking skill. It's possible to acquire the bulk of Cooking skill increases using just fish, so if you need to powerlevel Cooking, this would be the way to do it for minimal investment. Eventually some of your best recipes will require fish, so it makes sense to level both skills together.

Any time you see a Cooking or Fishing vendor, it's a good idea to check their inventory and see if they have any recipes you're lacking. Quite often you'll find new recipes this way. Whatever you do please don't buy Cooking recipes from the Auction House. Every Cooking recipe in the game can be quested for or purchased from a vendor. There are a couple of exceptions such as Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops and Runn Tum Tuber Surprise. Both of these are dungeon-related items which require special effort to acquire. You can safely exclude them from your repertoire if you like, since you wouldn't see it on the Auction House anyway. Other recipes you might be unable to get would be those that are exclusive to the opposite faction. If these recipes are important to you, you'll probably have to purchase them through the Neutral auctions.

Moving Through the Ranks

As you increase your Cooking skill, you'll reach the level cap every 75 points. When that happens you'll need to return to your Cooking trainer to move up to the next rank. There are Cooking trainers in every major city and you can ask a guard to mark your mini-map if you're unsure where they are located. Once you reach 300 skill you'll need to go to Outland for the next trainer and at 375 skill you will need to venture into Northrend to continue progressing. If you need specifics, you can find links to appropriate trainers on our Cooking Recipe List.

Making Money

If you're interested in selling your wares, "buff" foods are in high demand, and the materials are extremely cheap. Buff foods can sell for 20-50g per stack depending on the buff. Generally foods with Strength, Agility and Spellpower will be used by the largest pool of shoppers. Fishing is a great complimentary skill to Cooking if you'd like to make money from cooked food. Fishing is also an easier way to collect large quantities of buff food, since critter meats are dependent on drop rates.

Fun Food

There are a number of silly food items in the game that are just there for fun. This includes Savory Deviate Delight and Dragonbreath Chili. Savory Deviate Delight, when eaten, creates a random effect that can turn you into a pirate, allow you to Feign Death like a Hunter, Fear and more! Dragonbreath Chili gives you an effect that will cause you occasionally belch flame at your enemies when you are hit during melee combat. This lasts for about ten minutes.

Cooking 300-375

Whereas previously the Outland recipes were the best foods available, the Lich King expansion has changed that and Outland foods are no longer as desirable as they were previously. You'll still need to do a bit of cooking if you want to get to the final tier recipes, so I would still advocate collecting critter drops while you make your way through Outland so you can skill up to the Northrend starting level.

Depending on your needs, there are a couple of ways to level your Cooking skill. If you're in a hurry and just want to blaze through I think the easiest way is to collect 4-5 stacks of fish. You can easily reach 350 skill just cranking these out. If you're also looking to level your Fishing skill, this is probably the fastest way to get through both secondary skills with the least effort.

The more fun way to tackle Cooking is to level the skill up through adventuring. There are a good number of recipes that will see you easily through the first fifty skill points. In Hellfire Peninsula you can purchase the recipe for Ravager Dogs and do the quest chain for Buzzard Bites. You'll kill enough buzzards and ravagers during your time in Hellfire to easily gain 20 skill points cooking up the dropped meat. Plus the Ravager Dog has a great +40 attack power buff and who can say No to attack power?

If you're looking to collect all of the available Cooking recipes in Outland, adventuring is the only way to gain access to some of them. You'll be required to reach Neutral with Kurenai in order to purchase from Doba in Zangarmarsh or Nula in Nagrand (Uriku and Gambarinka for Horde players). If you don't quest in either of those zones you won't have the proper faction to purchase their recipes. In my opinion it's more fun to level Cooking this way so you can use the food you're creating while you quest in each new zone.

Once you are 320-325 Cooking skill (and Neutral Kurenai faction), you should try to visit Nagrand and purchase all of the cooking recipes from Nula/ Uriku. You'll need to kill some of the critters in Nagrand for the necessary ingredients, or if you've already completed Nagrand you hopefully saved the drop components. Most people will probably have a ton of Talbuk Venison and Clefthoof meat from the "Mastery" quests to reach 350 Cooking skill. There are also several types of fish you can cook at this point if you have Fishing, such as the Icefin Bluefish, Figluster's Mudfish and the Golden Darter. You healers out there will love the Golden Fish Sticks for a healing buff almost equivalent to the potion made by Alchemists. If you'll also be running dungeons during your time in Outland, these buff foods will be quite valuable in boosting your effectiveness during those runs.

Most of the Nagrand recipes for 325 skill will see you safely to 360-365. When you reach 350 in Cooking you don't necessarily have to keep going in order to be ready for Northrend Cooking. But if you want to collect additional recipes, make sure you visit Blade's Edge Mountains. Horde players can complete a quest there that will reward them with two new Cooking recipes. Alliance players can purchase these same recipes from a Sassa Weldwell at Toshley's Station. There are also a few specialty recipes for high-end Cooking that you may be interested in acquiring, including the Spicy Crawdad. This can be purchased from Innkeeper Biribi at the Allerian Stronghold (Rungor at Stonebreaker Hold for Horde). There are also a few recipes available from Kylene in the Lower City that can also be use to level up Cooking past 350 skill.

If you're interested learning more about the elusive Spicy Crawdads, there's a very detailed fishing guide written by El of Ravenholdt called Catching Furious Crawdad and Mr. Pinchy which I highly recommend reviewing before you head out. He has a very nice map which shows where to find the lakes that harbor these fish and how to find the spawned fishing pools.

Northrend Cooking: 375-450

The Wrath of the Lich King has expanded the Cooking cap to a new level of 450. There are also some important changes to the leveling process which you'll want to take into account as you plan your progression. There's a new daily quest for cooking available from Katherine Lee in Dalaran. You'll want to start doing her daily quest as soon as possible to collect the daily tokens given as a reward. These tokens are used to purchase new recipes and Northern spices that will be required to level Cooking beyond 400 skill. By starting her quests early, you'll ensure that you have a good supply of tokens to purchase a variety of recipes for leveling.

You may also have to buy spices from Derek Lee. All of the higher level cooking recipes require Northern Spices and you'll need 50+ spices to reach the Cooking cap. Since a 10-stack of Northern Spices costs 1 token, it will take at least 5 tokens to cover spices. Usually there are spices in the goodie bag that's also given with the daily reward, but typically only 2-3 spices per bag. It would take you at least 20 dailies to save up spices that way, so it's probably better to plan for it with token purchases.

Getting to 400 Cooking is fairly easy, just make any of the recipes from the trainer that are available at 350 skill. My only tip here would be to avoid recipes that require rhino or mammoth meat. Those two items are used in recipes at the end of the Cooking progression, so it's best to save them up for the final push. Otherwise you'll just have to farm more later, so why make it worse on yourself? There are plenty of other recipes to choose from, if you can fish that's a great way to collect materials for this early phase of Cooking. These trainer recipes turn green around 390, but you can still get to 400 without too much pain. The last 10 points were gained at around a 30% skill-up rate, which isn't too bad for green recipes.

At 400 you unlock the vendor recipes from Derek Lee in Dalaran. If you took my advice and started the dailies as soon as you hit Dalaran, you should have plenty of tokens to spend when you reach this point. A good strategy here is to once again to select recipes that you can easily farm to materials for, while still avoiding the use of rhino/mammoth meat for the home stretch. You could also pick a recipe that you'll be able to use yourself since there's no point in making stacks of mana regen food if you're a warrior. It will probably take 30-40 combines to get from 400-425 in cooking, so make sure you have enough materials if you're looking to push through to the next wave of recipes. When you get to 425 skill, some of your vendor recipes will go gray. Some of them stay green, so just focus on those until you reach 425 skill.

At 425 you'll be able to learn two "feast" recipes that the vendor sells. These are the recipes that will most likely get you to 450 and they are pretty component intensive. Each feast requires 6 pieces of meat and fish, different varieties depending on which recipe you purchase. The feast recipes are yellow when you learn them, so you don't get a guaranteed skill point for every feast you make. Despite this, they still grant pretty good skill points. As of the 3.0.8 patch they were giving around 90% skill points and they stay yellow all the way to 450.

It's possible to skip the feast recipes and level from 425-450 using the 400 skill recipes that are still green. The chance to gain a skill point from these recipes is pretty low, so it's a toss-up whether this would actually take less materials than the feasts. However, if you don't mind making more of the green buff foods and don't want to make feasts, this may be a viable alternative.

There are some interesting and fun new foods in Northrend as well. The first you'll probably run into are the "emotion" foods which include Bad Clams and Tasty Cupcake. These recipes are a random drop in Northrend, but they appear to have a higher drop rate in dungeons. If you're interested in collecting them all, it might be helpful to run a few dungeons to increase your chances. The emotion recipes are Bind on Pickup, so you cannot buy them from the auction house or a vendor. The Cooking vendor in Dalaran has a few interesting recipes, including a few recipes that enable to you track various mobs and a specialty item called Critter Bites. Critter Bites are a lot of fun, they let you to turn a non-combat critter into your pet for 3 minutes. You can "convert" multiple animals if you like, which can be pretty entertaining.

There are a number of achievements related to Cooking and if you want to earn those you may as well incorporate them into your cooking plan. Some require you to make a particular type of food and there is one that requires you to make every Northrend recipe. If you manage to complete all of these achievements, you'll be granted the title of "Chef".

Good Luck and Happy Eating!