Cooking

Cooking is an ability in.

Overview
Cooking can be achieved either by roasting edible Materials with direct flame, such as with a Campfire or a flaming Weapon, or by holding up to five Materials with a lit Cooking Pot. Roasting Food causes the former Materials to lose their potential effects in exchange for a slight increase in their health restorative properties. Properly Cooking with a Cooking Pot allows Link to bring out the latent effects from Materials.

Up to five individual Materials can be Cooked together by holding them and throwing them into the Cooking Pot. Depending on the properties of the Materials, the resulting Food product may increase Link's attack, defense, Stealth, maximum Hearts or Stamina, or his resistance to elemental conditions. Different individuals or posters and books will share recipes with Link and some NPCs may request a recipe for a side-quest, therefore showing Link the prerequisites for materials.

Elixirs
Elixirs can also be made by throwing Critters and Monster Parts into a lit Cook Pot. Cooking meals with ancient parts, critters, monster parts, wood or ore will result in Dubious Food or Rock-Hard Food. Cooking with monster parts or critters will fail unless the other required material is provided. Critters control effect potency while monster parts control duration. Having all but one critter will produce much longer elixirs while having all but one monster part will generally create high-strength elixirs.

Elixirs may appear to be skewed in terms of duration or effect but using mostly high tier monster parts tends to show duration being scaled significantly. Monster parts are categorized into three-tiers, so elemental keese wings/chuchu jelly are tier-2 while guts are tier-3; so this means Hinox Guts or Lynel Guts are not any better than Keese Eyeballs or Bokoblin Guts. If one wishes to spread resource efficiently, it is wise to use the most common tier-3 monster parts, generally Keese Eyeballs or Bokoblin Guts.

Adding Acorns, Apples or Chickaloo Tree Nuts will add minor healing and duration boosts. Dropping fairies into a cook pot will produce a strong healing elixir of varying strength (depending on how many fairies) and like meals, elixirs may receive 'critical cooks'. Dragon parts or star fragments provide duration buffs, with horn-shards providing a massive 30 minute buff.

Effects
Certain items impart effects and if cooked into a meal, will impart the effects to the meal, such as cold resistance or an attack-power buff. Ingredients that give the same effect can stack, however, two different effects cannot be active at once; with the exception of Hearty and other effects.

Technical & Effect Calculation
How a meal's heart-restoration value is calculated:

Formula for effect duration calculation:

Effect potency operates on a points scale. All effect-imparting item add up to a total, and if said total is high enough, the effect-tier is increased. Tier-3 is the max for most effects, which is triggered by passing a 'threshold total' for most effects. As example, Porgies add more ATK/DEF potency points than others, due to being stronger effect modifiers. Some effect-imparting items do not have tier-3 equivalent items, however, such as Hasty items.

Cooking has a chance for random bonuses, otherwise known as a 'critical cook', and is a 1:10 chance or 10% chance per attempt. This becomes a 100% chance with blood moon risings, however before the cutscene so the exact time being 11:35pm-11:55pm. The window for this is actually incredibly short, as it is technically only 20 seconds.

The following items are duration modifiers (excluding star fragments and dragon-parts):
 * Chickaloo Tree Nut (+10secs)
 * Acorn (+20secs)
 * Apple, Hylian Rice, Rock Salt, Tabantha Whwat (+30secs)
 * Cane Sugar, Fresh Milk, Goat Butter (+50secs)
 * Bird Egg, Goron Spice (+60secs)

Monster Extract may slightly or drastically improve three factors (hearts, duration, effect) but may also may incur no changes or make them worse. A meal using monster extract may see nothing or only duration boosted but may also have all three boost-types applied; whether positively or negatively. Cooking with it will never trigger random chances for a bonus, even if star fragments or dragon parts are added.

Trivia

 * During development of, Eiji Aonuma had the idea of adding Cooking into a game. However, it was never implemented prior to as he could not find a way to make it fun and exciting.