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How to Cook

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Your family farmhouse comes with a kitchen. You don't need to buy any cooking utensils or refrigerator like in other versions of Harvest moon; however, you can't cook anything unless you know the cooking recipes! This version of Harvest Moon doesn't allow you to combine ingredients to try to learn your own discoveries. You will need to know the cooking recipe before you can create the dish.

Cooking recipes are split into eight categories: Salad, Soup, Fried dishes, Pot (boiled) dishes, Rice, Bread and Noodles, Desserts, and Drinks. When you learn a new cooking recipe it will be marked as NEW in your recipe list. To see your known recipes, stand next to the kitchen and press the A button. There are a total of 325 cooking recipes to learn in the game, and you only have to learn each one once.

Finding Cooking Recipes

Your kitchen will start with the recipes for Turnip Salad, Potato Salad, and Onion Salad. The remaining recipes come from a variety of places:

Selecting Ingredients

The majority of your cooking ingredients are going to be found or grown by you. Hana will sell some staples, such as Flour, Curry Powder, Oil, etc., but everything else will need to be collected. These will be crops that you've grown, items produced by your farm animals, fish that you've caught, or wild items that you can forage off of the ground.

Cooking ingredients can be stored in your Refrigerator and will not rot or decay. If you need more space, your Refrigerator can be upgraded by buying the blueprint from Rebecca's shop. You can also store the ingredients in your rucksack, but then you're stuck carrying around ingredients that are taking up precious bag space.

Some of the cooking recipes are going to want a general type of ingredient such as an egg, crop, mushroom, honey, or herb. For these ingredients, you can use any item that belongs to this type of ingredient family. For example, if a recipe requires "milk", then you can use Milk, Jersey Milk, Yak Milk, Great Milk, Great Jersey Milk, Great Yak Milk, or Gold Milk.

If you are using a crop as one of your recipe's ingredients, the size of the crop can effect the number of resulting dishes. Using a normal size crop will result in as many dishes as the number you select on the Make How Many menu (e.g., if you use one Turnip, you'll receive one Turnip Salad). Utilizing larger sized crops will add a multiplier to the resulting number of dishes. Using a Big crop will result in three times the number of dishes, and using a Giant crop will return seven times the number of dishes. For example, if you are making Stir Fried Turnip (Turnip + Butter), using a Giant Turnip instead of a normal sized Turnip will give you seven Stir Fried Turnip dishes. Using a Big crop and a Giant crop in the same dish will only add the 7x multiplier.

Working With Recipes

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To start cooking, walk up to your kitchen and press A. The list of recipes and their categories are listed on the bottom touch screen of the 3DS. You can page through the categories by pressing the Left Shoulder and Right Shoulder buttons, and use the directional pad to look through the recipes in the category. When looking at a recipe, you can press the X button to toggle between the recipe description and the list of required ingredients.

If a recipe is grayed-out in your list of recipes, then you don't have the ingredients necessary to craft the dish in your Refrigerator or in your rucksack.

After you select your recipe the game will prompt you to select your ingredients. You can swap between your Refrigerator and your rucksack by pressing the X button. Then just select the ingredients you want to use and the number of dishes you'd like to cook. You can create up to 99 cooked dishes at once as long as you have enough ingredients.

The Star Rank of the ingredients you use will impact the resulting rank of the cooked dish. When using multiple ingredients that have Star Rank, your dish will be based on the average of the combined rank of the ingredients. Another factor will be your cooking rank. The cooking rank will give you a little bit of a boost on your resulting cooked dishes, so the higher your rank, the more of a boost you'll receive on the Star Rank. Your cooking rank will increase as you cook but it is based on the number of times you cook and not the number of resulting dishes, so it is best to cook each dish one at time if you are trying to increase your cooking rank.

One easy way to do this (although time consuming) is to use the Bread recipe you receive from Emma on Spring 12. Buy Flour from Hana's general store for 290 G each (or 28,710 G per stack of 99 Flour). Put the Flour in your Refrigerator, which is the default inventory for selecting ingredients, and then use your kitchen to cook Bread. This recipe only requires Flour so it is an easy recpie to make. If you want to make this while doing something else (e.g., watching TV or a movie), stand next to your kitchen and then:

  1. Press A (to open your kitchen)
  2. Press Left Shoulder three times (which moves you to the Bread/Noodles category of recipes)
  3. Press A (since Bread is always the first recipe in this category)
  4. Press A again (this will select the Flour that is in your Refrigerator)
  5. Press A (to bring up the number created, which you'll only want to make one)
  6. Press A to confirm the recipe
  7. Press A to close the "Finished cooking Bread!" dialog box

Then just start over to cook another Bread. You can do the same technique with Fried Rice Ball, but Rice cost 340 G whereas Rice costs 290 G each. Eventually you'll level up your cooking rank. You will need to cook 3000 times to reach the maximum cooking rank level.

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