Welcome to Northrend and your new and improved cooking skills. Food consumables have almost doubled in potency and have lots of useful buffs to take advantage off, so to get you started, here is a quick guide to everything you might want to know about cooking in WotLK
Leveling Cooking
Please note, this is a guide to efficient leveling. We are ignoring the buffs that the foods give.
Cooking is now made up of 3 distrinct phases. Reaching 400, completing achievements and reaching 450.
Getting Started
Do not start leveling with the first ingredients you get. Work your way through a zone or two collecting raw fish and meat before you start. You will probably collect the 4 BoP emotion food recipes clearing the starter zones. They have fairly good drop rate from normal mobs so grind away and get those recipes and your ingredients first.
First, make 1 batch of Tasty Cupcakes (requires Northern Egg), a Last Weeks Mammoth (Chunk o' Mammoth), Bad Clams (Succulent Clam Meat and Mote of Shadow) and Haunted Herring (Fangtooth Herring and Essence of Undeath). Eat one of each to get complete the "Second That Emotion" achievement and send the rest to alts or put in the guild bank to help those poor people that never bothered to level up their cooking.
Up to 400
Next make 12 Northern Stew then stop. They turn green 365 and at grey at 380 so they are an inefficient way to level, but you'll be using those stews later so we might as well make them while we can get a level. Do not exhast your stock of Chilled Meat because we will be using them once we reach Dalaran.
Now we start of the recipes you picked up when you first stepped into Northrend. They can level you up to 415, but they turn green at around 390. If you care about achievements you should make one of each recipe. Once completed, or if you aren't after the achievement just use whatever supplies you have remaining to make anything to get up into the high 390s. Rhino Dogs would be my suggestion because you will use an average of around 1 per daily.
The important thing to remember while building up to 396 is to save 5 Chunk o' Mammoth, Shoveltusk Flank, Worm Meat and Chilled Meat. At 396 we will make 5 Great Feast. They can be used to complete the "Dinner Impossible" achievement.
400 to 405 (Optional - For people after Northrend Gourmet)
This stage is about achievements and not leveling. Any levels are a bonus. There are 10 recipes that are learnable at 400 but turn green at 402. They go grey at 425 and there are much better recipes for leveling. You will make each of these items just once, to they are completed on Northrend Gourmet. These recipes are Firecracker Salmon, Imperial Manta Steak, Mega Mammoth Meal, Mighty Rhino Dogs, Poached Northern Sculpin, Spiced Wyrm Burger, Spicy Blue Nettlefish, Spicy Fried Herring, Tender Shoveltusk Steak, and Very Burnt Worg.
400 to 450
There are 10 recipes available at 400 that take you up to 450. Unfortunately these turn green at 415 so be prepared to make a lot of meals to take you to the top. These 10 items are Blackened Dragonfin, Blackened Worg Steak*, Critter Bites, Cuttlesteak*, Dragonfin Filet*, Hearty Rhino*, Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak, Snapper Extreme, Spiced Mammoth Treats* and Tracker Snacks*. Items marked with a * take just one meat input to produce so should be your prefered method of leveling but use any drops you might get. Avoid Blackened Dragonfin. Dragonfin Filit is twice as efficient. Caution should be taken not to use up all your Rhino Meat or Chilled Meat because you will still be using those for the daily quests.
It will take 311 attempts to go from 400 to 450 with the 10 recipes above.
At 425 you can learn Gigantic Feast and Small Feast. In terms of pure profession level they are slightly less efficient than the double meat dishes and less than half as efficient as the single meat dishes. Their comparative efficiency never changes so if you are making them to complete the achievements it doesn't matter when they are made
Once you have obtained all the Northrend recipes, you can buy Recipe: Delicious Chocolate Cake. This item is available as a rare drop from from the Outland and Dalaran cooking dailes but the drop rate is low so many people will miss getting it. It is a requirement for "The Cake Is Not A Lie", "Outland Gourmet" and "Bad Example" achievements but because of the high cost (10 Dalaran Cooking Awards), being no use for leveling possibility of dropping as a daily quest reward, it is best left until after you have purchased all the useful recipes.
Dalaran Cooking Quests
There are 5 of these. The reward for the quests are a Dalaran Cooking Awards and a small spice bag. The spice bag gives multiple Northern Spices, Old Spices or Baby Spice and occationally an additional Dalaran Cooking Award.
Infused Mushroom Meatloaf + Sewer Stew require Chilled Meat.
Mustard Dogs! requires Rhino Dogs. This quest awards two cooking awards.
Convention at the Legerdemain requires 12 Northern Stew (Chilled Meat)
Cheese for Glowergold needs no previous cooking bits.
All quests need a bit of running around Dalaran and the surrounding areas to pick bits up.
For your rewards, you get the following:
Old and Baby spice just do cosmetic things.
The cooking award is used to buy recipes and Northern Spices.
Northern spices are used when cooking the upper tier of L400+ recipes. Since they are limited to quest rewards they are relatively rare.
Each recipe costs 3 cooking awards
Complete one of these dailies and you will get the "Dalaran Cooking Award" achievement
Completing all these quests will award you with the "Our Daily Bread" achievement. You can also get achievements for collecting 10, 25, 50 and 100 cooking awards.
The Northrend Gourmet achievements are awarded for having cooked 15, 30 and 45 different Northrend recipes.
The only other cooking related achievement directly related to Northrend is "Critter Glitter" This will require 2 and a half batches of Critter Bites. 3 batches of Bites requires 6 Chilled Meat and 3 Northern Spices.|||Excellent! Thanks!!|||NB: To the best of my knowledge, you can no longer buy the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipie for 10 Dalaran Cooking awards... that is a lie (sorry, couldn't resist). More accurately, I believe it was possible on Beta, but no longer available on Live.
Also note, for achievement chasers... the ultimate cooking achievement, with the Chef title reward, is currently, on live, not possible. This is due to 4 of the 45 Northrend recipies you need to cook being unavailable at the moment. Originally they were quest rewards, but the appropriate quests are no longer giving them out.
The recipies are Qungaloosh, Shoveltusk soup, Fish feast... and one more.
However, as we are all looking at the better part of another month before we will have earnt enough awards to buy all the recipies we can cook, there is still some considerable time for Blizzard to fix this problem with no delay to wouldbe Chefs out there.|||Quote:
NB: To the best of my knowledge, you can no longer buy the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipie for 10 Dalaran Cooking awards... that is a lie (sorry, couldn't resist). More accurately, I believe it was possible on Beta, but no longer available on Live.
I can confirm from personal experience that the recipe is a rare 'drop' from the Bag of Spices you get as a reward from the cooking daily, much like it was the case with the reward crate/barrel from the Shattrath cooking daily.|||I can confirm that - I received the Cake recipie from the Bag of Spices too. Should have mentioned that I guess|||Nice guide.
I've been doing a lot of cooking since Wrath.
On the first day of release I paid a mage 20g for a port to Dalaran and began my quest to get realm first grand master chef. After tons of help from friends and many sweat & tears, I achieved this.
I've been steadily working my way through all the achievements since this, and am nearly finished.
- The only Northrend recipe I now need is Small Feast, I've been very lucky with getting Dalaran Cooking Awards in my bag, and for the last 3 days in a Row I got one hehe.
- Apart from this I am missing 4 other recipes; 2 from low level Alliance quests (Nelf/Draenei start zones) which I will do soon. Third is from a horde quest, which means I will have to level a horde to 15 (challenging as I hate alts) and finally Dirges Chimerick Chops which is the only epic recipe in the game. This will require calling many favours from the guild as its a BWL quest chain (and a very long one at that).
- I now have 155/160 recipes. The patch will have 2 more to help me reach the target.
(Yes I'm a rogue, hence I have Thistle Tea).
It will be a nice feat to have all the cooking recipes in the game, something I'm sure will be very rare considering class, quest and faction restrictions involved. I don't think most people will hit the 160 recipes thing till future content patches / expansions.
BTW I do this for fun, and do realise its largely trivial and meaningless to most people :)
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