TotK How to Cook: No Pot, Effect Stacking, incredible success

Cooking in Tears of the Kingdom works almost exactly like it did in Breath of the Wild, with Portable Pots, a Recipe Book that can pick up the ingredients for you, and a few new effects added. This page covers the mechanics themselves: how to cook, what to do without a pot, how effects are calculated, how incredible success happens, elixirs and failed dishes. For ready-made recipes, see best recipes and the recipe finder.

How do you cook?

Stand at a lit cooking pot, take up to five ingredients out of your inventory and throw them in. Villages, stables and camps in the wild all have pots. The game’s tip reads: “Cook up some wild cuisine by throwing together some ingredients and seeing what happens. You can’t cook with an unlit pot.”

Three basic rules:

• Healing doubles. A dish heals the total of what each ingredient heals raw, times two, up to 40 hearts.
• The name and the effect are separate. The dish name comes from the base ingredients (meat, mushrooms, fruit…); prefixes such as “Mighty” or “Hearty” come from the effect ingredients.
• More is stronger. As the tip puts it: “Using more of an effect-imparting ingredient when cooking will increase that effect in the resulting dish.”

How do you cook without a pot?

Take Raw Meat: raw it heals 1 heart, as Seared Steak 1.5, as Icy Meat 1 plus a short burst of heat resistance, and cooked in a pot 2.

The Portable Pot’s description: “A Zonai device for cooking food almost anytime, anywhere. It lasts for cooking one recipe only.” Several Device Dispensers stock it, including ones on the Great Sky Island and the Thunderhead Isles; see Zonai devices for which. Rain puts out open fires, which is when the Portable Pot matters most — another tip notes that “since a portable pot doesn’t use fire, you can cook with one even when it’s raining.”

Think before roasting. The tip warns: “Keep in mind that roasting an ingredient won’t activate its potential special effect.” Save effect ingredients such as Endura Carrots and Mighty Bananas for the pot. How cold and heat work: temperature and weather.

How do effects stack?

One effect per dish. “Certain ingredients give elixirs or dishes special properties. But don’t get greedy; ingredients with different effects will cancel each other out.” Two different effects in one pot means neither survives, and you are left with plain healing. So use one kind of effect ingredient and fill the remaining slots with effect-free ingredients like meat, apples or mushrooms for hearts.

The level comes from points. Each effect ingredient carries points (Mighty Porgy 3, Mighty Bananas 2, Mighty Thistle 1…). The points for the same effect add up, and the dish levels up at each threshold. Every ingredient’s points are on the effect pages, such as Mighty dishes.

The duration comes from the number of ingredients. Every ingredient gives 30 seconds; each effect ingredient adds its effect’s base time on top.

Effect-free ingredients add only their 30 seconds. A few add more: seasonings (Cane Sugar, Goat Butter, Bird Egg and the like) a little extra, monster parts bring their slot to 1:10, 1:50 or 3:10 by grade, and a dragon’s horn adds 30 minutes on its own. The duration cap is said to be 30:00, as in Breath of the Wild, so one horn maxes it out.

Example: four Mighty Bananas and one Raw Meat. At 2 points a banana that is 8 points, past the threshold of 7, so level 3 Attack Up; the time is 4 × 0:50 + 0:30 = 3:50.

Extra Hearts, Extra Stamina, Stamina Recovery and Gloom Recovery have no duration: they act the moment you eat, and their strength comes from the points. See Hearty dishes and Sunny dishes.

What decides an incredible success?

An incredible success adds one of these at random (an option that does not apply to the dish is never picked):

• 3 extra hearts of healing (one more extra heart for Hearty dishes);
• 5:00 more duration;
• one more effect level.

The base chance comes from variety. Each different ingredient in the pot adds 5%:

The banana-and-meat example above uses only two different ingredients, so its chance is 10%.

Some ingredients raise the chance:

• Cane Sugar and high-grade monster parts (all guts, Lizalfos Tails and so on): +30%
• Bird Egg, Goat Butter, Goron Spice, Hateno Cheese, Oil Jar, mid-grade monster parts and dragon spike shards: +10%

An incredible success is certain when:

• You cook on a Blood Moon night, from about 23:30, when red particles start drifting through the air, until the Blood Moon cutscene at midnight. See Blood Moon.
• The pot holds a Star Fragment, a Golden Apple, Gibdo Guts, or a dragon’s scale, claw, fang shard or horn (Dinraal, Naydra, Farosh and the Light Dragon all count). Gibdo Guts are a monster part, so they only work in elixirs.

Monster Extract works the other way. It is said to rule out an incredible success and instead set the duration to 1:00, 10:00 or 30:00 at random and push either healing or effect strength to its minimum or up a step, just as in Breath of the Wild.

How are meals and elixirs different?

Elixir = critter + monster part. “If you combine monster parts dropped by fallen foes in a cooking pot with things like lizards and butterflies, you can create elixirs with special effects.”

• The effect comes from the critter (frogs, lizards, butterflies, darners, rhino beetles, fireflies…).
• Monster parts add no hearts and no effect level, only duration and incredible success chance. Apart from Gibdo Guts, which monster they came from does not matter, only the grade: low-grade parts like horns 1:10, mid-grade like fangs and eyeballs 1:50, high-grade like guts and tails 3:10.
• You can add food to an elixir as long as the effects do not clash.
• An elixir is named after its effect: Mighty Elixir, Fireproof Elixir and so on. Recipes for each are on the elixirs page.

Fairies. Throw a fairy in alone, or with ingredients that would otherwise make an elixir or a failed dish, and you get a Fairy Tonic that heals a lot. “If you have a fairy help you cook, the tonic you produce together restores a great deal of hearts.”

Why did I get a failed dish?

The item descriptions do not mince words. Dubious Food: “It’s too gross to even look at.” Rock-Hard Food: “A dish gone awry after adding the wrong ingredient.”

How do you use the Recipe Book?

Every dish you make is recorded in the Recipe Book. “In the recipe book, accessible from your inventory, you can view the ingredient lists used for any known dishes.”

• Select a dish in your inventory and choose “Check recipe” to see what went into it.
• On a Recipe Book card, choose “Hold ingredients” and Link picks up that dish’s ingredients for you; walk to a pot and throw them in.
• Select an ingredient and choose “Select for recipe” to see the dishes that use it.

The Recipe Book records base dish names only, without effect prefixes. All 228 entries: all recipes.

What changed from Breath of the Wild?

• Portable Pots let you cook anywhere.
• The Recipe Book can “Hold ingredients” for you.
• The healing cap went from 30 hearts to 40.
• Golden Apples and Gibdo Guts also guarantee an incredible success; the new dragon spike shards add 10%.
• New effects: Glow, Gloom Recovery, Gloom Resistance and Slip Resistance. When gloom eats into your hearts, a Sunny dish repairs them.
• Everything else (doubling, canceling, point thresholds, how duration is counted, incredible success odds) is the same; see how to cook in Breath of the Wild.

Related

• Best recipes: the 15 effects and their ingredients, recipes to sell, the Horse God
• Recipe finder: tick what you carry and see what you can cook
• Elixirs: which critters make which elixir
• Recipes to sell: how sell prices work
• Warding dishes: gloom resistance before the Depths