Cooking

In Breath of the Wild, a major function of the game is the ability to cook. To make dishes, Link can cook at any cooking pot, which are located all over Hyrule. Cooked dishes are very useful as they can not only recover your hearts, but sometimes have added effects that will help you explore different areas.

If you're looking for Recipes, check that link, and if you're looking for a page on Elixirs, check that one.

General Notes

 * To cook with a cooking pot, light a fire underneath it (if it's not already lit), and open your inventory. You can hold up to 5 ingredients at a time to cook. Select the items you want, choose "hold", exit your inventory and cook in the pot!
 * There are some combinations of ingredients that will result in either Dubious Food or Rock-Hard Food. This is usually a result of trying to cook with inedible items, like gems, wood, monster parts, or critters. Check the pages for more detail on how to avoid making those.
 * As a general rule, dishes will double the sum of the number of hearts the ingredients that are used would restore. For example, making Simmered Fruit with 4 apples that normally heal half a heart will heal 2 hearts.
 * If you cook with a fairy, it will hover over the pot, and increase the number of hearts the dish will restore. This will consume the fairy, though, and take up a fifth of the items you can hold.
 * Occasionally, when you're cooking, you'll hear a special jingle played. This indicates a "critical success". It means that the resulting dish will be even better than normal (it can add to the number of hearts the dish restores, the strength of an effect, or the duration of an effect, etc.). The occurrence of this for the most part is random, but from 12:00 to 12:15 on a blood moon, you can guarantee a critical success.

Added Effects in Cooking
A big advantage of cooking is having dishes that provide additional effects. Some are necessary to get to certain areas of the game. They can vary in strength, from low, to mid, to high. The duration of the effect can also vary. When a dish has an added effect, it will gain a prefix, as listed below.

Other Prefixes
There are a few other prefixes that can be applied to some recipes, that don't actually have any additional effect but change the name and appearance of the dish.

Copious - Use 4 or more of the same category of ingredient. (all ingredients' pages are categorized, like apples, for instance, are in the "fruit" category.)

Prime - Use Raw Prime Meat or Raw Bird Thigh

Gourmet - Use Raw Gourmet Meat or Raw Whole Bird.