Cooking is the most complex activity in Tales of the Shire. Chopping, mixing, frying, seasoning… If you want to create delicious dishes, you’ve got to learn all that and more. It’ll take some effort, but once you get the hang of it, you won’t just be a top chef; you will also be the most popular Hobbit in Bywater.
From the basics of cooking to achieving the flavor bonus, here’s everything you must know about cooking in Tales of the Shire.
How to cook in Tales of the Shire
To make a dish, enter your kitchen and choose “start cooking.” You can select any recipe you’ve unlocked, as long as you have the required ingredients. Tales of the Shire’s fishing, foraging, and gardening activities will get you more fish, fruits, veggies, nuts, and seasonings. Meat, flour, barley, milk, and any other ingredient listed as “miscellaneous” in the encyclopedia must be bought from a store. To unlock additional recipes, organize Shared Meals with the Townsfolk and satisfy their cravings or serve their preferred flavor.
Once you’ve chosen a recipe, it’s time to select the ingredients. The recipe may ask for a specific ingredient, such as rhubarb, or an ingredient type, such as a vegetable. In case of the latter, you can select any vegetable in your inventory, be it rhubarb, lettuce, or cucumber.
Image: Wētā Workshop via Polygon
Try to select ingredients with a high deliciousness score; if you use ingredients with more stars, the dish will receive more stars as well. The more delicious the dish, the more friendship experience you’ll receive when you serve it to your friends. Depending on the total number of ingredients in the recipe, every additional ingredient star will roughly translate to ¼ or ? of a deliciousness star in the final dish. Based on ingredients alone, a dish can receive up to three stars.
Next, you must prepare each of the ingredients. At the start of the game, you will be given a chopping board and a frying pan — no additional cooking stations just yet. Some ingredients can be added to the assembling bowl without extra steps (such as oats or milk), while others require chopping (fish, fruits, veggies, etc.). The game will automatically tell you whether chopping is required. Frying is optional.
To improve the deliciousness score, be mindful of the texture chart in the lower right corner of the screen. See the tiny star? If you move the dish icon close enough to the star, you’ll gain an extra deliciousness point. In the picture below, the dish has reached the perfect texture, and will thus receive +1 deliciousness score.
Here’s how to move between the textures and get closer to the star:
- Crispy vs. tender: This is the horizontal texture profile, affected by various cooking stations. At the start of the game, you can use the frying pan to move towards the right (more tender) and the mixing bowl to move towards the left (crispier).
- Smooth vs. chunky: This is the vertical texture profile, affected by chopping. If you want to make the dish smoother, cut the ingredients more often, and vice versa. In the picture below, the star is currently closer to the word “smooth” than the dish icon. By making the veggies smoother before adding them to the assembling bowl, the dish icon will also move upwards.
Image: Wētā Workshop via Polygon
Tales of the Shire cooking stations
As you unlock more cooking stations, you’ll get more opportunities to adjust the ingredients’ flavor. Beware that you may be able to use more than one cooking station per ingredient. In the example below, the penny bun has already been chopped and may be added to the bowl, but as you can see, the frying pan on the right is also highlighted in blue — since the deliciousness star requires more tenderness, it would be best to fry the penny bun first.
Image: Wētā Workshop via Polygon
Be sure to hover over your cooking stations and check whether you’ve missed any optional steps before moving on to the next ingredient!
To unlock new cooking stations, you must improve your cooking level. Every meal you make adds to your experience, but completing cooking missions is particularly effective. You will unlock cooking missions fairly early during the Bywater Village Campaign Tale (the main quest). Here’s an overview of every cooking station in Tales of the Shire:
- Chopping board: Chop very briefly for a chunkier texture, or longer for a smoother texture.
- Frying pan: Use it to make an ingredient more tender.
- Mixing bowl (unlocked at cooking level 2): Makes the ingredient crispier.
- Saucepan (unlocked at cooking level 3): Makes the ingredient more tender.
- Pickling jar (unlocked at cooking level 4): Makes the ingredient crispier.
- Pestle and mortar (unlocked at cooking level 5): Makes the ingredient smoother.
Tales of the Shire flavor bonuses
Finally, you can gain an extra deliciousness star by creating a dish with two flavors — not more than that, but exactly two. Most ingredients come with a flavor type: bitter, sour, sweet, spicy, etc. In the example below, the currant is sour, the hazelnut is sweet, and the penny bun is bitter. Ingredients without a flavor profile, which is the flour in this case, do not affect the flavor bonus.
Image: Wētā Workshop via Polygon
By using an optional cooking station and adding seasonings, you can change an ingredient’s flavor. In this example, frying the penny bun in butter would turn it into a sweet ingredient, which is enough to claim the flavor bonus.
Mind you, it’s also possible to fry the ingredient without changing the flavor. If there had been no penny bun in this recipe, there would’ve been no need to add seasonings.
