Stardew Valley Cooking Guide

ConcernedApe, the developer of Stardew Valley, has gone on record saying he does not want cooking to be profitable but there are some exceptions.

Cooking food provides better health and energy (and sometimes stat bonuses) than regular food.

It is unlocked after adding a kitchen to your house by providing the following materials to Robin at the carpenter shop:

• 10,000g
• 450 Wood

The kitchen provides a stove for cooking food and a 24 slot refridgerator for storing food.

Tip: Store food in the refridgerator. The game checks the refridgerator and your inventory to determine what food can be cooked. Food that can be cooked will be highlighted.

Due to the high cost of upgrading your house, I'd put off cooking until late summer or early fall of your first year. Upgrade your bags twice and upgrade most of your tools at least once before upgrading your farmhouse.

Best Recipes

The best recipes are a balance of good stat bonuses and relatively common ingredients. Since speed and luck can only be boosted by food, there's a slightly heavier weight for recipes that provides boosts to those stats.

Lucky Lunch is extremely good (+3 luck), but is relatively hard to make (1 Sea Cucumber, 1 Tortilla, 1 Blue Jazz); blue jazz is grown in the spring, corn is grown in the summer and fall, and sea cucumbers are caught in the fall and winter.

Fish Stew (+3 fishing) is also fairly easy to make if you use crab pots often (1 crayfish, 1 mussel, 1 periwinkle, 1 tomato).

Profitable Recipes

While most cooking recipes are not meant to be profitable, there are a few exceptions (and these profits decrease rather quickly with the Fisher or Angler professions).

Note: Only use low quality, low base value fish for Sashimi: perwinkle, anchovy, carp, herring, mussel, sunfish, oyster, and sardine (bream and ghost fish work without the Fisher profession).

I left off some recipes that can be profitable in some circumstances. Bean Hotpot is an example of this, where the value of the ingredients (80g) is less than the value of the cooked food (100g) if you did not use quality ingredients (you'd take a loss by adding silver or gold quality green beans).

Cooking Achievements

The following achievements are unlocked by cooking (all rewards can be purchased from the cat at the abandonded house in the forest):

Cooking has no impact on your evaluation at the beginning of year three.

Food & Ingredients

Some food can be purchased from vendors and makes cooking some recipes much easier.

The Stardrop Saloon
12 AM - 12 PM Daily

The Stardrop Saloon can be found in the center of Pelican Town and is open every day between noon and midnight.

Outside of the various recipes that are offered, coffee and bread are the two best things to purchase from the Saloon. Coffee for the speed bonus and bread is a great gift for villagers or used to make Survival Burgers (does not require a kitchen).

Fish Shop
9 AM - 5 PM (Closed Saturday unless raining)

Willy's Fish Shop is on the very southern part of the beach

Nothing too special about the Trout Stew offered from the fish shop. You're better off cooking Dish O' The Sea by catching sardines and buying the hashbrowns recipe from Stardrop Saloon if you have a kitchen.

Pierre's General Store
9 AM - 5 PM (Closed Wednesday)

As the table below shows, JojaMart also sells the same cooking ingredients, just at a 25% price gouge. However, it is open every day from 9 AM - 11 PM.

Oil can also be made in an oil maker with corn, sunflower, or sunflower seed after two days. This isn't recommended, but it is an option for idle equipment.

Recipes

You receive the following recipes by unlocking the kitchen:

Food can be cooked if the recipe is unlocked, but will continue to display "???" instead of the actual recipe. However, there is no indicator that the recipe can be cooked and icon will always be greyed out. You will not learn the recipe after cooking it.

The Stardrop Saloon has a rotating stock of recipes available for purchase. It's a good idea to stop by the saloon on a regular basis if you are looking to get all of the recipes early.

Skills

The following recipes are aquired by leveling up your skills to level three, with the exception of survival burgers at level two.

All of these recipes provide a large boost to the skill required to make them. Dish O' The Sea is the most useful of these recipes.

Social Rewards

A lot of recipes are acquired by becoming friends with the villagers of Pelican Town (most often at 3 hearts and 7 hearts but sometimes at other levels as well).

George, Robin, and Willy provide the best recipes by increasing their friendship levels to 7. It might also be a good idea to note that Linus and Marnie have profitable recipes at level 3.

Queen of Sauce
Cooking Channel

The Queen of Sauce airs weekly on the last day of each week (7, 14, 21, 28) and rotates every two years. It's very important to watch the show every week. If you miss a day, you'll have to wait two full calendar years to get the recipe again.

Note: There is no show on 28 winter during even years.

Closing Thoughts

Cooking is generally fairly expensive for the benefits that you get from it, especially if you need to buy ingredients from the general store. Thankfully, most recipes share some common ingredients like milk/cheese, eggs, tomatoes, and corn.

If you plan on cooking a lot, having a couple barns and coops while dedicating your greenhouse to the crops you want to cook will go a long ways to make your life easier. Tomato, eggplant, and hot peppers have quite a bit of overlap when looking at the best recipes and are perfect for your greenhouse since they are vine crops. Throw in the occasional pumpkin and potatos and you're all set.

Resources

• Official Website
• Steam Page
• Official Wiki
• Official Forum
• SDV Subreddit
• Farm Planner