Cooking that earns more than it costs
Why cooked dishes beat raw ingredients in the shipping bin, and the specific recipes worth making at each stage of the game.
The short answer
Almost every cooked dish sells for more than the sum of its ingredients, and the markup grows with the dish’s star rank. A single-ingredient dish like baked potato turns a 75g crop into an 80g dish, and late recipes like golden cookies add 480g of profit per dish. Cooking before shipping is the cheapest income upgrade in the game.
How cooking prices work
The game starts with the value of a dish’s ingredients, then applies a markup based on its star rank. One star adds 10%, two stars add 15%, and five stars add 30%. Because the markup applies to the full recipe, dishes made with valuable ingredients earn proportionally more. The exact rule and star table are on the cooking page.
For restore calculations, ingredients count once per slot, not per unit. If a recipe uses six of one item, the game counts that item once. This changes the energy value, while the sale price still uses the recipe’s ingredients and markup. Cooked dishes sell for more than their parts.
The early dishes that pay
| Dish | Skill | Ingredients | Output value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baked Potato | 4 | 1 Potato | 80g |
| Wild Berry Jam | 2 | 6 Wild Berries + 1 Sugar | 115g |
| Tomato Soup | 14 | 1 Tomato + milk + herb | 220g |
Baked Potato is an early source of cooking profit: one potato worth 75g becomes an 80g dish, and a full harvest can be cooked in minutes. Wild berries grow on bushes around town, so Wild Berry Jam costs little and sells for more than three times the raw berries’ value.
The mid-game dishes
Once you have milk, eggs and cheese, Omelet is a useful staple at level 22 with a 280g output. At level 14, Tomato Soup gives the best early return on a regrowing crop because every tomato harvest can become soup.
The general rule: cook the dishes whose ingredients you already produce in bulk. The recipe browser sorts every dish by profit, so check it against what your farm currently grows.
The endgame dishes
The highest-margin dishes in the game:
| Dish | Level | Profit per dish |
|---|---|---|
| Golden Cheesecake | 40 | 580g |
| Golden Cookies | 40 | 480g |
| Harvest Plate | 40 | 175g |
| Beet Soup | 40 | 160g |
| Vegetable Pot Pie | 38 | 125g |
These dishes need animal products such as golden milk and golden eggs, so they become available as your ranch develops. Their profit per dish is high, and so is the ingredient cost. The ranching page explains how animals produce golden items.
When not to cook
Check these cases before cooking an item:
- Ingredients with a higher use. Ores, stones and most foraged crafting materials have no dish; do not hold them for the kitchen.
- Star-rank floors. A one-star dish ties with the raw ingredients in restore value; it is the price markup, not the energy, that makes cooking profitable.
- Requests that want the raw item. Some request board quests ask for a specific crop or fish in its raw form. Check the request before cooking a whole harvest (request board guide).
A simple cooking routine
Cook after the day’s harvest, then ship the dishes the next morning. Keep ingredient stocks low enough to avoid spoilage. Pair this routine with the Seed Maker’s seed sales; the money guide puts both methods in the wider income plan. Together, they can ease the pressure on gold by the end of spring in year one.