The cook-your-food game mechanic in Skyrim is often ignored as there are better alternatives, like the restoration magic and potions. And the fact that players rather choose to eat a hundred pieces of cheese-wheel or raw ingredients instead of a cooked meal speaks volumes.
So why should you care about cooking food? Well, cooked foods have huge benefits compared to raw foods. Not only do they restore more health points, but they also grant you added bonuses like Fortify, Resist, Regen, etc.
For example, consuming raw beef will restore 2 points of your total health, whereas eating a cooked one will restore 10 health points.
You can even add other ingredients into the mix and make yourself a beef stew, which gives bonuses like Fortify Stamina and Restore Stamina.
Furthermore, if you’re playing the game in Survival mode, then cooking is practically essential to staying alive. That being said, let’s move on to how you can actually cook food in Skyrim.
Cooking food is very easy, and you don’t necessarily have to be a master chef. You just need to gather up some raw ingredients and seasoning. Then, use them in a cooking pot or a spit to make yourself a cooked meal.
Let’s talk in detail about cooking below, starting with gathering the right ingredient.
Get the Ingredients
The first thing you’ll need to do is gather some raw foods and ingredients since you can’t really cook without the ingredients. Foods and ingredients are categorized into different types.
For example, there’s the fruits and vegetables, raw meat, dairy, baking ingredients, and other miscellaneous ingredients.
You can get most of the ingredients either by looting barrels and sacks or buying them from General Goods Merchants and Innkeepers.
But the rarer ingredients like Moon Sugar and Eidar Cheese Wheel require you to do a bit of scavenging too.
Find a Cooking Spot
After gathering the necessary ingredients, we’ll need to find a place to cook them. We’re looking for Cooking Pots or Cooking Spits in particular.
If you’re looking to make some baked goods, then you’ll need an oven. We’ll go over it in a bit.
Now, there’s no shortage of cooking spots in the game. In fact, you’ll find them in almost any homes, inns, camps, farms, etc. A few accessible places are as follows.
- Breezehome in Whiterun.
- The Bannered Mare in Whiterun.
- Outside the Riverwood village.
Ovens, on the other hand, were added later in the game with the Heartfire DLC. Although they work similarly to cooking pots, the recipes you can cook are completely different.
Food that you can make from the oven are Bread, Apple Pie, Garlic Bread, Lavender dumplings, etc.
Since ovens were part of the player-built homestead, you can only access them after adding the kitchen extension to your house.
Note: Use the carpenter’s workbench in the kitchen to add an oven to your kitchen.
Cook the Foods
We’ve got our ingredients, we found our cooking station, and now all there’s left to do is to cook.
- Interact with the Cooking pot or the Spit to open up the recipe menu.
- Granted that you have the necessary ingredient to make a proper meal, select the food that you wish to cook.
- The cooked meal will be directly added to your inventory.
Refer to out video guide for more assistance.
Best Food Recipe
There are a variety of food recipes that you can learn and make it yourself at the cooking station. However, you should know that not every meal is worth your time and effort.
There’s no reason to make recipes that require rare ingredients when you can make a similar recipe requiring common ingredients.
For example, both Beef Stew and Vegetable Soup will restore your stamina for 720 seconds. While Raw Beef for Beef Stew is a bit expensive and difficult to obtain, the vegetables for the Vegetable Soup are cheap and relatively easy to gather.
We’ve listed some of the worthwhile recipes below.
Vegetable Soup
In my opinion, vegetable soup is the best food item that any melee-class player can have in their inventory. Not only does it restore a point of health, but it also restores stamina every second for 720 seconds in total.
Now a point of health and stamina restoration every second might not seem much, but the restoration effects stack on top of each other when you consume multiple food items.
For example, consuming 50 units of vegetable soup will restore both your health and stamina by 50 points per second.
To make a serving of vegetable soup, you’ll need a single unit of Cabbage, Potato, Leek, and Tomato. Then, use these ingredients in the cooking pot to make the soup.
Elsweyr Fondue
While the vegetable soup was relatively cheap and easy to cook, the Elsweyr Fondue, on the other hand, can be a bit difficult to make. This is primarily because it requires one of the rare ingredients in the game, i.e., Moon Sugar.
You can only get the Moon Sugar in a few selective places, including the Riften Warehouse, Redwater Den, or by trading with the Khajit Caravans.
You’ll need a single unit of Moon Sugar, Eidar Cheese Wheel, and a bottle of Ale to make Elsweyr Fondue.
The reason why this meal is so great is that consuming it will grant you the Fortify Magicka and the Regenerate Magicka bonuses for 120 seconds.
More specifically, you’ll get a 100-point increase in your total Magicka as well as a 25% bonus on your Magicka regen rate.
Garlic Bread
Now, unlike the aforementioned recipes, Garlic Bread does not increase your stats point, nor does it boost your regeneration rate. Rather, this food item is best used for utility purposes, i.e., curing all your diseases.
Garlic Bread is a great alternative to the Potion of Cure Disease, and having a few of them in your inventory can be very helpful, especially if you’re fighting vampires.
All vampires have a chance to infect you with the Sanguinare Vampiris, which will turn you into a vampire. So, to avoid unwanted vampirism, make sure to take some Garlic Bread along with you.
To make a couple of slices of Garlic bread, You will need a single unit of Garlic, Butter, and Bread.
While you can easily purchase garlic and bread from the general trader, you’ll find butter to be more accessible after adding Churn to your homestead.
