Guide to Leveling Cooking and Making Gold in Shadowlands

Cooking is a profession that lends itself hugely to varied routes that depend entirely on the supply of materials on your realm. Due to the large number of possible reagents, certain recipes can essentially be the perfect target for some players, but incredibly expensive for others, due to population and supply differences.

The most important things to note are:

• Keep all of the Cooking reagents you find while leveling; you will find a decent number of them from killing beasts on your leveling path and these can be used for recipes.
• If you choose to level Fishing at the same time as Cooking, it will be slower than buying the materials from the Auction House, but you will save a huge amount of gold.

For the leveling path we recommend below, assuming that you do not have any materials whatsoever from gathering yourself, you will need:

• Vendor Products
  • 61x Inconceivably Aged Vinegar (purchased from vendor)
  • 59x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)
  • 60x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
  • 79x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)
  • 41x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• Meat Products
  • 21x Aethereal Meat
  • 112x Raw Seraphic Wing
  • 60x Shadowy Shank
• Fish Products
  • 26x Lost Sole
  • 60x Pocked Bonefish
  • 26x Silvergill Pike

If you make the swap at level 30 to making Banana Beef Pudding, your reagents list will instead look like this:

• Vendor Products
  • 61x Inconceivably Aged Vinegar (purchased from vendor)
  • 81x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)
  • 48x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
  • 115x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)
  • 29x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• Meat Products
  • 57x Aethereal Meat
  • 36x Phantasmal Haunch
  • 112x Raw Seraphic Wing
  • 60x Shadowy Shank
• Fish Products
  • 26x Lost Sole
  • 24x Pocked Bonefish
  • 26x Silvergill Pike

For these levels, you should make the Pickled Meat Smoothie. It is a very cheap recipe to craft and there is no reason to craft anything else until it goes green, due to the use of Aethereal Meat.

The materials required for this section are:

• 21x Aethereal Meat
• 21x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 21x Inconceivably Aged Vinegar (purchased from vendor)

Craft the Cinnamon Bonefish Stew for these levels, but note that you can swap to Banana Beef Pudding at skill level 30 if your realm does not have enough fish and the stew becomes too expensive to craft.

For leveling this section with Cinnamon Bonefish Stew, you will need:

• 60x Pocked Bonefish
• 20x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
• 20x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 20x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)

If you swap to the Banana Beef Pudding at skill level 30, you will need:

• 24x Pocked Bonefish
• 36x Aethereal Meat
• 36x Phantasmal Haunch
• 8x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
• 8x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 42x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)
• 36x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)

For this part of the leveling, you should make Steak a la Mode. This ,once again, features meat rather than fish, but specifically uses Raw Seraphic Wing, which should be available in large amounts, due to them dropping from mobs that are required for quests in the early stages of Bastion.

For leveling this section with Steak a la Mode, you will need:

• 60x Shadowy Shank
• 60x Raw Seraphic Wing
• 40x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)
• 40x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
• 40x Inconceivably Aged Vinegar (purchased from vendor)

For the final stretch, you will be making Seraph Tenders, another recipe which makes use of Raw Seraphic Wing once again.

For leveling this section with Seraph Tenders, you will need:

• 52x Raw Seraphic Wing
• 26x Lost Sole
• 26x Silvergill Pike
• 39x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)
• 39x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)

If you want to level both of the professions at the same time, you can do so very effectively, saving yourself a decent chunk of gold, but it is more time consuming, due to having to farm the fish yourself.

In the leveling path below, we assume that you have no meat available for use and wish to only use vendor materials and the fish you have found via leveling your Fishing.

THIS IS NOT THE MOST EFFICIENT LEVELING ROUTE. THIS ROUTE IS DEFINITELY MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE ONE LISTED ABOVE IN TERMS OF TOTAL VALUE LOST. IT IS ONLY WORTH DOING IF YOU ARE COLLECTING ALL OF THE FISH YOURSELF AND NEED FISHING LEVELS.

For this section, you will want to make the fish counterpart of the first recipes, Biscuits and Caviar.

For leveling this section with Biscuits and Caviar, you will need:

• 21x Lost Sole
• 21x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)
• 21x Rich Grazer Milk (purchased from vendor)

Craft the Cinnamon Bonefish Stew for these levels. While you have the alternative of swapping to a meat-based craft at 30 with the other path, this leveling route exclusively uses fish.

For leveling this section with Cinnamon Bonefish Stew, you will need:

• 60x Pocked Bonefish
• 20x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
• 20x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 20x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)

Craft Candied Amberjack Cakes until you reach skill level 50. You will need:

• 24x Iridescent Amberjack
• 24x Pocked Bonefish
• 16x Medley of Transplanar Spices (purchased from vendor)
• 16x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 16x Lusterwheat Flour (purchased from vendor)

For the final stretch, you can craft Spinefin Souffle and Fries, but note that it does go green for the final few levels. If you would prefer to craft only at yellow crafting difficulties, which means a higher chance of leveling up after each craft, then you can craft Fried Bonefish from 70, but it is slightly more expensive to make.

If you only craft Spinefin Souffle and Fries, you will need the following approximate ingredients. Note that, due to the final crafts being green, you may require more or less than we list.

• 90x Spinefin Piranha
• 90x Iridescent Amberjack
• 120x Smuggled Azerothian Produce (purchased from vendor)
• 60x Inconceivably Aged Vinegar (purchased from vendor)

Making gold with Cooking is almost exactly the same every expansion, with extremely heavy dependencies on the number of people raiding at that point in the patch.

Your only source of income from Shadowlands recipes, for almost every situation, will be from selling food to raiders.

We will update this section with more information on which foods are used by the highest number of specialisations, as well as give a breakdown of the usefulness of each food. Due to certain stats being favoured, it is unlikely that you will make much profit crafting a food that only one specialisation wants, for example.