Cooking Recipe List | Hell’s Kitchen | No Man’s Sky Beyond

You can use Frost Crystals to make Glass Grains and those to make Refined Flour, rather than hunting for Heptaloid Wheat. Frost Crystals grow faster than anything.

By my analysis, the only plants you need to gather as there’s no suitable farmables are:
1) Fireberry or Pulpy Roots for Scorching Sauce (Fireberrys are better as you can also use them for Ever Burning Jam or Spiced Ice, two things you can’t make without Fireberries).

2) Impulse Beans for Bittersweet Cocoa.

3) Hexaberry for Anomalous Jam.

4) Grahberry for Grah’jam, but since you would likely use Grah’jam to make something else you can usually substitute in either Crab ‘Apple’ or Leopard-Fruit to make their own jams, both farmable from certain animals using the Livestock Unit.

5) Sweetroot is really only needed for Mushed Root Pie (Cactus Flesh can be converted to Nectar then Sugar for all sweet recipies).

6) Aloe Flesh is likewise only needed for Refreshing Drink, so not worth going out of your way for.

There’s a few odd meats like Leg Meat for ‘Legs-in-Pastry’, but typically meats can be hunted much faster and more plentifully than gathering wild plants, so I don’t consider them as things to be on the lookout for. Most meat dishes have pretty interchangable ingredients. If you don’t want to hunt you can farm Mordite to make most of these, but hunting really is much faster.

There’s also some items like Foraged Mushrooms for Fungal Omelette or Earthy Pie that are apparently no longer available in-game (despite the name Foraged Mushrooms are/were farmed from mole-like animals). I don’t know what else besides Foraged Mushrooms are currently unavailable.

Other thoughts on cooking:
1) If you’re just looking to make Units, you’re better off crafting Trade Items from farmed plants and harvested gasses. This is commonly known.

2) Most people who cook stick to Fibrous Stew as being the best return on your time for feeding to Cronos. It’s easily made using most farmable plants so it’s fast and easy to generate large amounts, but you end up spending more time just feeding them to Cronos, which is dead boring and requires constant clicking. Personally I’d like to spend a little more time making something he really likes such as Caramel Doughnuts and get a better return on each click of feeding him.

3) Cactus Flesh takes a long time to grow, but is used in such small quantities against Star Bulb to make Poly Fibre that you’re going to have lots left over. You can either get used to making Unstable Gel for Units or sugary items for Cronos to get Nanites from the surplus.

4) Frost Crystals up to your ears. There’s gotta be a better solution to how to make use of them, Crafting into Glass is actually worth less Units than selling the Crystals and Cronos seems to hate Bread from the Flour and Yeast (Faecium) that you can farm plentifully. Living Glass sells for a decent amount of Units but then you’re limited by how fast you can grow Gamma Root. You can farm eggs and milk to make ice creams and custards, but it still seems out of prortion and a bit of a time suck to utilize them.

5) I think there is an easy solution for the developers here to reinvigorate interest in cooking. Mission Agents currently give out the Valuable Items Sought type of quests, but those only ever seem to be for minable resources like Uranium. If they added more complicated food products into this quest type, and gave them suitably high rewards like freighter expansions, I think a lot more people would get re-interested in cooking.