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 BotW:, 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 50% increase in their health restorative properties. Properly Cooking with a Cooking Pot allows Link to bring out the latent effects from Materials and double their heart recovery. Dishes and elixirs cooked in Cooking Pots occupy one Inventory slot each in the Food tab, while roasted ingredients of the same type stack on each other, making them good if you're running low on Inventory space.

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.

There are four types of ingredients: dish ingredients, critters, monster parts and dish enhancers. Using dish ingredients makes dishes,while using critters and monster parts creates elixirs. Trying to create dishes with materials that are not ingredients, mixing monster parts with dish components, using critters in a dish recipe, trying to cook critters without a monster part or cooking two effect-imparting ingredients of different types will always make Dubious Food or Rock-Hard Food. These foods have no effect and only heal exactly one heart.

Dishes
Dishes are a type of food made of basic ingredients that is known for its tendency to regenerate large amounts of hearts as well as having special effects. It is very easy to have a ton of these, since the materials required are much more common than those required for elixirs.

Elixirs
Elixirs can be made by throwing critters and monster parts into a lit Cooking Pot. 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.

Monster parts are divided into three tier levels which most monsters will drop. For instance, Bokoblins will drop tier 1 Bokoblin Horns, tier 2 Bokoblin Fangs, and tier 3 Bokoblin Guts. Although parts from some monsters are more valuable than others, only the tier of the part matters in cooking, not the strength of the monster it comes from; Hinox Guts are exactly as effective as Bokoblin Guts in spite of belonging to a much bigger and tougher monster. Keese Eyeballs are common and count as tier 3, making them excellent ingredients, but Chuchus and Octoroks only drop tier 1 and 2 ingredients. See Food for a full list.

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.

Dish enhancers
Adding certain ingredients like Acorns, Apples or Chickaloo Tree Nuts will add minor healing and duration boosts to the dish. Dropping fairies into a cooking pot will produce a strong healing elixir of varying strength (depending on how many fairies). 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 Wheat (+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.

Extras
Combining certain types of ingredients in a pot can result in many different dishes. There are a ton of delicious-looking food sprites found in Breath of the Wild, and that gives an astonishing amount of diversity to Link's menu, despite the sprite does not change anything in terms of effects. When consuming a piece of food, cooked or not, there are a few different animations Link can undergo while "eating it", despite the food doesn't appear and Link looks like he's not eating nothing. The types of food that have different animations are:
 * Small food items, like Apples.
 * Food on plates, like Spicy Sautéed Peppers.
 * Soup.
 * Skewers, like Seafood Skewers.
 * Bottled food.
 * Dubious Food and Rock-Hard Food.

Trivia

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