Cooking is a classic goldmaking staple, and it is still relevant in Dragonflight. I’m already way too late on covering it, but better late than never.
Cooking basics
Cooking is a very simple profession. You use meat and fish alongside vendor materials and you get to craft consumables of the food type. This is one of two main long term consumables in the game and a lot of players use these for PvE.
Maximizing crafting stats
Cooking is very competitive so you need to maximize your stats as much as possible. There’s no quality on either the finished foods or most of the reagents, so multicraft and resourcefulness are the only two that matter. THere’s also no talent tree. You do have two tools, the cooking hat from tailoring and the rolling pin from inscription. They give predefined stats, but you will want both at q5 rare. You should then put a draconic resourcefulness enchant on a rolling pin.
Past the stats you get from the tools the only way to get more stats is with optional reagents. Salad on the side gives +90 multicraft and Impossibly sharp Cutting Knife gives 110 resourcefulness. These may be profitable, but it will vary from craft to craft and depend on current prices. In addition if you are max rep with the artisan’s consortium you can craft the ooey-gooey chocolate once a day. This reagent seems to guarantee a multicraft proc when you use it, and you only get 1 per day. You want to use this on whichever recipe has the largest value for crafted items.
The recipes
The main recipes you want to look into are Feasts and the Fated Fortune Cookie for mainstat, and all the best double secondary foods. The feast recipes come from the community feasts. There are different recipes all yielding essentially the same feast, so hopefully you get the recipe for the cheapest one. Fate Fortune cookies are the 1-off main stat foods and the recipe is trainable on the AH.
The double secondary foods are learned from crafting one of four different recipes: Filet of Fangs, Salt-Baked Fishcake, Seamoth Surprise and Timely Demise. All of these four are tradeable on the AH, so you can just buy them. You only need two of them to cover all the stat recipes.
Skill matters
For feasts and secondary stat foods the quantity of items you get depends on your cooking skill. I haven’t tested the entire skill curve, but once you get to 100 you get the maximum amount every time, so that is the target. The double secondary recipes is the best way to get to max skill, and it is not overly expensive, with the total cost likely less than 5000 gold, unless the AH recipes are expensive.
Reset days
As with every consumable in the game you can expect profit to peak on reset days. This is by far the best day of the week for selling any consumable, enchant or anything else players will need more of when the raids reset and they go to loot their vault.
TSM Settings
The TSM settings assumes you have quality 5 of both the rare Wildercloth’s chefs hat and the Rolling Pin. I then used my multicraft and resourcefulness calculator to get the correct pricing based on crafting. Salad on the side or Oeey-Gooey chocolate uses will essentially provide pure profit if they are profitable.
TSM Settings
fovxUTTrqyiBiaJ(qGTqIsIDslRsDQvRrkPILLDAlATSIEPviUsUP5TWLIRixikUelxkl3h5rqhbEeYd9a4tWaFe8rip4N7SKuIgTW2cqJ(Mz(25Fvk50b9(4B)WjVR)PRkoMZhZ8DUoM9gJdB1QzRvYr7VxqLUmFwOl6wRpL4q9LHlC2ekNdBDW8bsIuRlNBVW0HWA5Wd0lGgfWgfWxxa3Ra2SaUFbS1s4Hfr4W9S6sjHYWURycp0ekBcRz2DLrjhfnuY4(y5)GR60v743L2PAtiZI5tPcbZMAgFSGmsQOe)Io0rKipj8yZ4bU8GaLv4POQ1aFwavKPm)9uFBUyPZp9xeb1LhfU0c8WrWJEqqfdDDhTEmFndT8sr58jBIK2uj2sjEMs8CLOm(QnHQ3oH1UhcO7xcF51XelS96rM9jFUycX7ebBinXIzFcvme3HREXqI)qQxFAapuAg8OBQEQRGg6Y9SRz4CvMJ)03gFyK0m2osquTr5GnyoyWP)o)So52kDXykn4pIi(sM88k6j4y(TZcyy4QOhJkPLHfotWPs8eMFQEB1mc063Oj(RqvahtWbxsGYzFAiv22N7tJJYRHA6dHQxdFfuh(6vHAMWlW6e(gty7YWllbFBfDyh8B9lW4T9W8vl89xAO3CBTL6Ax2aDxO)QgOo8dGoyOsWtQcpTBW6PUtRYEuPl3EfvlH1KKpCCTg6Zt7b(iMe2nbXl8yOdBQcaup22AcrmMk)SiZxX05QCld4r4ojSBBINm0nMKDMe622I4p2TVteZZ2nydCJC2r5B10kYe2cZr1elQh)SulZk9bS82zA6Xzi1ZBxn2ih5oDA3N6GXSxALC0uND1udBCCVRM(Ro42zLUPYy162zveQ9VNeMsQ59KVus7D3PlLZRVJSTGtJ7ozPCmuc9M1Z)O9DA)p21HNHZ6)zo1Ny5rBhDUzsgCaoLnfPN9YZlLSyjJy4NgvJ46c)SRqTy)Oc)lUWV62EcH55gSUAbD0ijvK9xe76xQSGxdEwC8w39QPHDWWj4N)EIxevyNPC50WSYk1k8MGnugMDtQ4bCW6PwVbt1v9ZXMy6NvvBBIZIlXsbRNzXF5XzPlMGhAfeECEF9B)xEWpIVEXDSKGc2FtlnpCj8l(3