Stardew Valley, a roleplay game so cozy that it has its in-game cooking show. Cooking is a core aspect of the dark medieval 2D game, and cooked meals can revitalize a player’s health and energy like no raw food can. Since the game is meant to simulate a real farming experience, cooking recipes with real farmed ingredients makes sense and adds a realistic touch to the game.
Stardew Valley has a total of 74 kitchen recipes, with meals ranging from Blueberry Tart to Tom Kha Soup. The recipes have become so popular that people in the Stardew Valley community have begun trying out these meals in real life. But there’s more to farming and putting together a recipe when it comes to cooking in the game. Here’s everything you need to know on how to cook in Stardew Valley and become a Gourmet Chef!
How to Start Cooking in Stardew Valley
Cooking in Stardew Valley needs three criteria: a location to cook, the recipe, and the ingredients for the recipe. The whole purpose of Stardew Valley is to restore your grandfather’s farmhouse, and cooking is a great way to use up all the produce you didn’t sell while keeping your player satiated during the day.
Building the Kitchen
- When you first acquire the farm from your grandfather, the house only has one bedroom and needs to be upgraded before you can cook in it. Upgrading your house includes buying a kitchen extension from Robin when her shop is open. You’ll have to travel to the North East section of Pelican Town. Robin opens shop in her house, and you can interact with the building until you get the ‘Upgrade House’ option.
- You can purchase this for 10,000 Gold and 450x Wood, and you’ve got yourself a brand new kitchen. If you’re short on gold, spend some time selling seasonal vegetables from your farm until you’ve collected enough. It takes three in-house days for the upgrade to be complete.
- The kitchen comes with a stove and fridge. The fridge also acts as an inventory, where you can store all your ingredients to cook with later. Much like in real life, you’ll have to store poultry, meat, and any fish you manage to catch inside the fridge if you plan to cook with it.
- If you’re on Foraging level 9, you can also build a cookout to cook in the outdoors. For this, you’ll require Fifteen items of wood, Ten items of fiber, and three items of coal and can craft the cookout. You can use this instead of a stove and cook on it, but it does disappear at the end of the day. There’s no fridge included in the outdoor cookout.
Finding Recipes
- There’s more than one way you can find recipes in Stardew Valley, and there are a total of 74 kitchen recipes to be found. All players start with the recipe for Fried egg. Unsurprisingly, this only requires one chicken egg to cook.
- You can find more recipes by watching ‘Queen of Sauce’ on your player’s TV. Each time there’s a new episode, you’ll receive a new recipe. If you happen to be watching a re-run on the TV, you don’t get a new cooking recipe.
- You can also buy cooking recipes from the Stardrop Salon. When you’re interacting with Gus at the till making sure you scroll to the end to find recipes up for sale.
- Food Recipes are also a reward for upskilling in some parts of the game.
- Since you can gift villagers home-cooked meals, it only makes sense that they can gift you cooking recipes in return. Getting recipes as gifts from friends isn’t common in the game but can occasionally happen if your friendship level with them is high enough.
- Most recipes have added benefits and help the player’s skill in either combat or farming while increasing health and energy levels.
Searching for Ingredients
- Since Stardew Valley is a game focused on farming, most ingredients in cooking recipes can be farmed on your own.
- However, some ingredients are more expensive to farm than others or simply rare items. In this case, you can buy a particular ingredient from Pierre.
- You can also visit JojaMart if you can’t find it with Pierre.
Cooking a Meal
- Once you’ve set up your kitchen, collected recipes, and farmed all the ingredients, it’s time to get down to cooking. You can do this by walking to your stove.
- Interacting with your stove will give you a pop-up menu with a list of all the recipes you currently own.
- Clicking on the dish will get your character to make the meal. Now you can keep the meal for later in your fridge, gift it to your neighbors in Pelican Town to increase friendship level, or even sell the final meal to earn some extra G. Eating your cooked meals gives you maximum energy and health.
Achievements for Cooking in Stardew Valley
All that hard work doesn’t go unnoticed. The more you cook in Stardew Valley, the more you climb the skill ladder.
- Cooking 10 meals (all different recipes) earns your player the ‘Cook’ achievement
- ‘Sous Chef’ is the achievement unlocked once you’ve cooked 25 of the recipes in Stardew Valley.
- If you’ve hunted down each of the 74 recipes in Stardew Valley and made all of them, you earn the ‘Gourmet Chef’ title.
Best Recipes in Stardew Valley
Here are some of the best recipes in Stardew Valley that fetch you the most money for your cooking efforts:
Pink Cake
To make the pink cake recipe, you’ll need 1 Melon, 1 Wheat Flour, 1 Sugar, and 1 Egg. This recipe is found from watching a ‘The Queen of Sauce’ episode. You can sell the Pink Cake for 480 Gold.
Fish Taco
The fish taco recipe can be found in your friendship with Linus. You’ll need 1 Tuna, 1 Tortilla, 1 Red Cabbage, 1 Mayonnaise, Buffs Fishing (+2). You can sell Fish Taco meal for 500 Gold.
Stir Fry
The stir fry recipe can be found in an episode of ‘The Queen of Sauce.’ You need 1 Cave Carrot, 1 Common Mushroom, 1 Kale, and 1 Oil. You can sell a Stir Fry meal for 335 Gold.
There are just a few of the recipes in Stardew Valley. If you’re looking for more help on other integral aspects of the game, check out how to find the blacksmith in Stardew Valley.
