Cooking Guide for The War Within

Cooking makes combat stat-boosting food, such as Stuffed Cave Peppers, profession stat-boosting food, such as Ghoulfish Delight, and feasts that can be used by a full raid group, such as Feast of the Midnight Masquerade.

You can also condense 5 food into a Hearty version which persists through death with the Hearty Food craft, or 10 feasts into a version that also persists through death with the Hearty Feast craft. These abilities replace Dragonflight's Alchemical Flavor Pocket for The War Within.

Pandaren have +5 skill to Cooking with the Gourmand racial, and also benefit doubly from being well fed due to Epicurean.

Also, due to its high world material requirements, Cooking pairs well with farmer characters, such as Guardian Druid and Beast Mastery Hunter with Skinning, who will naturally be killing beasts that drop many of the materials and meats needed. Characters dedicated to Fishing will also be able to help with Cooking materials.

Food has no Quality, making Ingenuity useless, but it is still worth analyzing what Multicraft and Resourcefulness can do for Cooking, and which is the best gear and consumables you can get:

Increasing your skill with Cooking is done by crafting items that grant skill points as usual, but the endgame of the profession is in the search for all recipes, most of which are sold by specific vendors.

Cooking has no Specializations.

Ideally, Cooking allows you to convert cheap meat and fish into expensive stat food and feasts. Due to food's commodity nature it is very likely that the market will quickly get loaded with foods that are only marginally more expensive than the materials used to create them, but there will be much more demand for basic ingredients than usual due to the best foods requiring a massive amount of other weaker foods to be used in their creation, thus using a huge amount of ingredients.

We have a specialized guide for The War Within gold-making below, which contains a gold-making tier list and goes deeper into techniques and habits for successful gold making, as well as websites and addons that can help you on your journey!