Cooking has always been one of the better professions to make gold as you can get it on any character in addition to your other professions and the buff foods are consumables, which gives you very strong demand.
Buff foods in classic
The available buff foods vary across phases. Currently there are 6 different buff foods that represent the best in slot options for various classes and situations. Overall these are much less streamlined than what you are used to from retail if you play BfA.
Dragonbreath Chili gives you a fire damage proc on melee attacks, Grilled Squid gives 10 agility, Monster omelets and Tender Wolf Steaks gives you 12 stamina and spirit, Nightfin soup gives you a mana regen buff, Runn Tum Tuber Surprise gives you 10 intellect. For rogues and hunters the Grilled Squid will be best, whereas most caster DPS will want the Runn Tum Tuber. Nightfin soup is best for healers, Dragonbreath Chili for warriors and retadins and the stamini food for tanks, or anyone else who prefers survivability.
Getting the recipes
All of the recipes except the Runn Tum Tuber Surprise are vendor recipes that can be traded. You can find them all on the AH, or go to the vendors. The Runn Tum Tuber Surprise recipe is a bind on pickup drop from Pusillin in Dire Maul East, so go do that if you haven’t got the recipe yet.
The list below shows you which vendor will sell you which of the vendor recipes.
Nightfin Soup: Gikkix, Steamwheedle Port, Tanaris
Grilled Squid: Gikkix, Steamwheedle Port, Tanaris
Tender Wolf Steak: Dirge Quikcleave, Gadgetzan
Monster Omelet: Himmik, Everlook
Dragonbreath Chili: Helenia Olden, Theramore or Ogg’Marr, Brackenwall Village (not limited supply)
You get all of them in Kalimdor, so do take a tour if you find them too expensive on the AH.
Materials needed
Overall cooking is very light on materials. Except for the chili the recipes only take on dropped material alongside some form of vendor material. The chili is by far the most expensive one on the list as it requires a small flame sac, which is also used in Fire Protection potions that are very in demand for MC.
Generally you should be buying these materials in bulk as cooking is usually a volume game. They only give a buff for 10 minutes, and will only ever be active for one pull.
A note on Grilled Squid
The Winter Squid required for Grilled Squids can only be fished during the winter. Once we get closer to spring it may make sense to stockpile these for the summer months as there will never be a better agility food in classic.
TSM settings
As with most volume items we want to post the food in larger stack sizes. They stack up to 20, so we will be posting in stacks of 20, 10 and 5. Feel free to experiment with the amount posted based on how you see them selling on your realm. If you never sell stacks of 5 you can of course cut it out.