The best way to a hobbit’s heart is through their stomach. While orcs and goblins might take this literally, to other hobbits it means a hearty homecooked meal. In Tales of the Shire you’ll spend plenty of time in the kitchen whipping up all sorts of culinary delights in order to impress and befriend the various citizens of the village.
Cooking in Tales of the Shire can be a bit overwhelming at first. You’ve got multiple ingredients to select for each recipe, with each ingredient having its own quality and taste properties. There’s also seasoning and then the introduction of multiple stations that complicate things further, plus an overall quality chart that tracks changes as you cook.
We thought we’d help make things a bit easier with this short guide.
Choosing the right recipe
The game features a ton of different recipes to cook, each with their own ingredients. It’s worth checking your recipe list as once you’ve cooked something you’ll understand its flavour profile, which is handy when you need to cook something specific. For example, rhubarb porridge has a sour profile, which was useful when I needed to deliver a sour meal to Delphi as part of a questline, so check what you’re planning to cook before you start!
Choosing the right ingredients
Each recipe allows for a certain level of flexibility when choosing ingredients. Usually you’ll be able to choose from the various berries and fish etc that you’ve got to hand. As you mix and match ingredients the star icon in the bottom right corner will fill up, and when full a second one will start. This shows you how your ingredients will impact the final meal quality, and help you maximise your star rating.
Cooking your meal
At the bottom of the screen you’ll see each ingredient in the recipe. When you start interacting with an ingredient, different things will happen depending on what needs to be done to that ingredient.
Some ingredients will simply need to be added to the pot. Others might need to be dealt with at one of the kitchen stations: you start with a chopping board and a frying pan but unlock more later in the game.
Take fish, for example, you’ll need to chop that before you put it in the pot. It’ll need chopping at least twice, but you can chop more depending on how chunky or smooth you want the food. Once it’s chopped you can either add it to the pot, or chuck it in the frying pan. Here you’ll need to cook it depending on how crispy or tender you want it (tip: press X to fill up the bar quicker if you want it tender). At this point you’re finished with it and can add it to the pot.
Make sure you check what you’ll be doing with each ingredient and don’t forget to use the relevant stations if you need them.
Food Quality
In the bottom right of the screen you’ll see a graph. Along the horizontal axis it goes from crispy to tender, while on the vertical axis it goes from chunky to smooth.
Every time you add food to the pot, it’ll update where your meal currently sits on that graph. Add in a fish you’ve only chopped twice then it’ll make the meal chunkier. Fry that fish to oblivion first and it’ll make it more tender too.
This lets you have a level of control over how the meal turns out. This is important as there’s usually a star located on that graph somewhere which will increase the quality and star rating of the meal if you finish cooking in-line with it. This tells you the direction to take while cooking, so try to aim for that if you can as it gives you a big boost which makes your food far more effective when having a shared meal with your pals.
And there you have it – a handy guide to cooking for hobbits. Be sure to check out our Tales of the Shire review if you’re on the fence about the game.
