How to cook food and make elixirs

The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild features a whole cooking system to allow players to create their own meals and elixirs using materials found in-game. Collect as many materials as possible and stock up on food before exploring or going into battle. A max of 60 cooked items can be added to the inventory at a time.

To cook food, you must first find a metal cooking dish above an open flame. These are found in each main town or at every stable. If the fire is not lit beneath the dish, throw a piece of flint near the wood and strike it with a metal weapon, or you can carry a flame using a torch from one fire to a stack of wood. Unfortunately, a fire isn’t possible while it’s raining, so wait out the storm by sleeping in a bed or doing something else with your time. With the fire and pan ready, go into your inventory and hold 2-5 different items from the materials section. Exit out of the inventory menu and drop the items into the pan to instantly create a meal or elixir that will be stored in the Food section of your inventory.

What’s the difference between a meal and elixirs? Meals are a cooked mixture of commonly found items such as fruit, vegetables, other plants, seafood, and raw meat. Elixirs are a cooked mixture of monster parts and critters (e.g. bugs, frogs, and lizards), but acorns and chickaloo tree nuts can also be added to elixirs. Mix materials from the food category with materials from the elixir category and you’ll get a censored dish of dubious food. It’s still edible, but has no special effects, is often terrible at restoring health, and no merchant will want to pay much for it while a great dish will get you hundreds of Rupees.

Additionally, some material can touch open flame, be exposed to cold climates, or get shocked by electricity and take on new properties. The material can either turn into a new type of material or become food and consumed without having to mix it with other items. Once a piece of material gets placed into the food category of your inventory, it cannot be mixed with other materials to make meals or elixirs.

Food Materials

The tables below list all the cooking effects for food material. Mix items with the same cooking effects to create great dishes. Placing items with different cooking effects together often negate them and simply restore health in the final meal.

A handful of materials are so great that they can be mixed with each other and still give you great meals. Mix five of the following materials with themselves: Mighty Bananas, Stamella Shrooms, Endura Carrots, Hearty Durian, Big Hearty Radish, Silent Shrooms, or Silent Princess

Elixir Materials

The tables below list all the cooking effects for elixir material. Mix at least one critter and one monster part to boost an elixir’s special effects or restorative properties based on the rarity of the monster part. If critters with different effects are put in the same dish, the result is often a censored plate of dubious food.