I realized I have not covered the secondary professions for Mists, which is a massive omission. So let’s take a look at cooking!
The ways of cooking are varied
One big thing to note about cooking in Mists is that it is split up into 5 different ways that are dedicated to cooking food for different stats. These all have separate skill points for the levels from 525 to 600, and if you want all the Best in slot consumable recipes you have to level all of them! It’s not super expensive, but it is an extra barrier to entry.
Cooking awards
All of the best food recipes require ingredients that can only be purchased for Ironpaw tokens. These you get from your cooking daily in Valley of the Four winds. In general you should always value these materials at the Auction house price as they can be freely traded. It is also possible to turn in cooking materials using the containers sold by Merchant Cheng. These require 100 vegetables or 20 of a meat or fish type reagent. If the price of meat is less than 1/20th the price of the various ironpaw token materials this will cut your costs.
+300 food is where it’s at
Generally the best food in pandaria is the +300 main stat pinnacle foods for each way. They are better than feasts and are the top dogs for that reason. The most important ways are the way of the pot for intellect, way of the Grill for strength and way of the wok for agility. The others don’t really matter for goldmaking compared to those three.
That means the token materials we care about are Rice Flour and Black pepper. 100 year soy sauce is not used in the +300 foods for the main recipes so we ignore those.
Sell when the price is good
Generally speaking cooking margins are quite thin in my experience if you check at a random time of the week. It is very important to buy up materials in bulk when they are cheap and to have a lot of stock ready to go on big raid nights. Prices do spike up when the Auction house runs dry, as we can see from this historic graph for the mogu fish stew on Firemaw. Selling of a significant portion of your stock at even just a slight bump of 2 to 3 gold is very significant. And here the price is spiking by as much as 8 to 10 gold at certain points.
Tsm settings to move quickly
Lastly you can grab my TSM setup below to post your food effectively to the AH. I would suggest mostly focusing on the +300 foods and manually restocking, start with a smaller quantity and see how you can move them before scaling up based on how your play patterns fit with peak demand.
fw5YUTTrxCC4liWOa(ERkGAxiOpKG4I0IHuK6sq3yzhJ0glFrY2XF9M5iXrISIIKLKswUl5QU2pc6rWl6dGEcoWlYdGFe8ISUNHxgjy7ePfd(pN535YmZzOMB0jnQDXBo)OdRFYcE744010UZ)8JHMVwIivSaXnZEmQFGVMSkjxJaAqU45jafLMaus9PaKDZMauGqYvJAApfvmuj5sWIPYkWZsKkeyPuPQ732G1YXwN6zY81ERzhJCtzifROB(PYGJJ(JYkAlfUeSAQS8ezf3V8HHaL9swwLaR6z(AmtkYUB(qq8mkzXcqMeLIqP(eousnzXII4wcYMOklSvj12K8RkLgyvzXQfeRQaBMOufQIjQks4HmxPIxqrQYskeI73m9r8(oxMZFY8eijyReLSqvqOuekvHQOqvwOQKQKicLiYsIiljISusKlskwbwowvIiufekLyvjz5IWIjQYPQceHswOuekHhfeEOi8qr4HIWdfHhkcpkQm)hMxRzslpSOg8mnyjT7F4npKrdYQbRQbBQDZ0N7WYAWwAFy(2J2UFRathB894k3UJhTDaQYjpuMe6mG55zQZ0ctTVYO6m)aNwDZHDi10cBy446YTh()2L1M23kaT2SHTPlZBf4yCY1NXS1D84mrZV59upMHtFFHf4TTH3TYyrQLgQYTEWKCjZZfCuweVoFObF4e(WIORzHtHdYcN9KapBwalnlGFkcyFoWHpjqMzbKDwaRolGnNfWpplGLNfWwZaax(fWPFmK2e7kQrhg2Jo8ipZwSrnn1pI51IzhSW4wu7wmR6mxh)an3VA6PNy4X8nCS0Zl15U4fo1whDSFGwOEFpkVjCb31n7y74XWplSBIT5g3LXCpUp1oWm4QniJWm)MHUMy42GaNpwLqEERKMNWEM2rv1TsYKNNl18nyi7rTIwzS8u8E8kBhQ7gQJC5lIDCSaOzy)KklpPfS)hH3dNd))fGFrd(vS6HFtd(9fG)yo4cSa04fbqHMqlqhyq784R5o4udUZh8c4S9CxlkFrPVglWWrFE(MiP9oVm56OY2PTzWnsQIIBeAnLb)c2H7bMZd)zE8LxxWc6H(bhLboEp48Bhe9iZNzz99sTU3l2Pjhz3LyPHtF8IYFVQuRaFJqA8lFFJQnP2DnQ3PVPLUH76410LBNCphv0AqDmrzg1Kz5CzKLHZDoUdE5K8(QCMT7e8YDRwN1bJznQxxwW2d68QC4)wH)qb5hk)PPKicQsFAQjHQ4msyeK6mYxeKYNpDrmf(mzlLr(ZNSigj(arDRKF5(UCpIElObEw)VxZSPnTyv7FL2Oyzd8uwZl6Tq0ZG0Bz(eWTDEQHb8xgE8R2l4AFdiWOApQPLH7A8ROTBhW8IF5OJnp3YTHDewnDW2DJ7g4VlgrpNRoJA1N5Php52b(XLwK1q9M9IM5Uo3(WP9aB3DxlY6uoWFdCcUFgCpVWRs7mPP0DTyt2t1OoUh21nfYxNSjF3JibhEes7RdO4G5FZ2GCT)e9x8Fp