New Cooking Skill Progression and Recipes

[Kajin]

Since ongoing skill and profession overhaul became a thing, I've been thinking of ways this could be applied to various skills and right now I want to talk about cooking.

 

Cooking, in it's most basic form, is the act of taking food and transforming it into another state that is more readily digestible. To put it simply, edible matter has a given nutritional value. But, in order to use that nutritional value, the body must invest nutritional value it has in reserve in order to process the edible matter. This results in a loss to the net gain of nutrients where, if a piece of food gives you 50 hunger, your body might invest 30 energy in digesting it resulting in you gaining only 20 hunger.

 

In this cooking skill system I propose, your character will learn and eventually master various recipes for cooking that maximize the amount of hunger satisfied versus the amount of energy lost during digestion. In the earliest levels, your character is doing little more than throwing ingredients into a pot or skillet or crudely butchering the meat and chopping the vegetables before cooking it. Little preparation is committed to the task of cooking and what preparation is done is rough and inefficient. 

 

As levels are gained, the character becomes better at previous prep techniques (more efficient butchering techniques harvesting more meat, better chopping techniques that slice food more evenly helping it cook better) while new techniques are gained (creating broths for soup, tenderizing meat before using it in a recipe, letting foods marinate in succulent juices, rendering ingredients from one state to another before using it like extracting fat to make lard, churning milk to make butter or grinding flour out of wheat, corn, potatoes, or anything else that is starchy and can be ground). These new techniques gained start out rough (meat is tenderized poorly, flour is coarse and whole grains are left intact, broths are watery and unsatisfying etc.) but as the character levels up they improve upon previously learned techniques to help create the most beneficial dishes possible, driving down the ratio of potential nutrients lost to nutrients gained in each dish created.

 

So at level 0-2, the character will only have very basic food prep techniques that consist of simply putting uncooked ingredients to fire or roughly chopping them up to put in basic soups or fried in a basic pan dish. Butchered animals will also provide unsavory ingredients such as organs and bones that can be crushed and ground up into a sort of meaty paste that is still unpalatable but not altogether as unpleasant as in the original form.

 

At level 3-4, previous techniques are improved upon and become more efficient (ingredients are chopped more finely resulting in a more even cook and the ability to cook unprepared ingredients like a simple slab of meat results in slightly higher quality meals). A couple new techniques are gained as well. Say, for example, tenderizing meat, grinding flour, and extracting fat to make lard or churning milk to make cream and butter. These gained techniques are newly learned and still rough, but give the cook more options where he previously had only a few. Instead of cooking grains into a porridge, he can instead grind those grains into a flour to use in gravy or soup or bread. Meat can be tenderized and made easier to chew and digest. Fats, creams and butters can be created and used to pack more energy and nutrition into individual meals.

 

At level 5-6, the ability to make broths and marinades is introduced. Use ingredients to make broths and spices to make marinades. Broths boost the flavor and nutrition of certain meals and dishes while marinades boost the flavor and nutrition of individual ingredients during the preparation stage before cooking. As before, previous techniques are improved upon. Flours aren't as coarse and meats are better tenderized.

 

Not sure what to do with techniques to add beyond these levels, though. Will add more after some thought and discussion. Changes like this would make a cook far more valuable and give a cooking specialist player something better to offer while giving them a plethora of tasks to involve themselves in so that they never find themselves sitting still and being bored waiting for timers to go down.

[Moose65]

I'm all for it, but first I think they need to address the ridiculously large amount of bugs with cooking :/

 

All professions could use some filling out as well.

[Kajin]

Was thinking about it a little more and I think the addition off tools and tool kits specifically for cooking would be awesome. It would really improve a cook's ability to make good, high quality food if they also had access to good, high quality tools. Knives of varying make and quality would produce different results. A pocket knife is better than nothing, but it'd get beat out by a really good quality chef's knife when it comes to chopping ingredients. Having a proper meat tenderizing hammer would be better than a carpentry hammer which would in turn be better than just hitting the meat with your fists. Measuring cups would help minimize overuse of ingredients and make meals more cost efficient to make.

 

Then there'd be tools not directly for cooking but still sort of related. A quern or mill of some kind to help grind grains and starches into flour. A churn to turn milk into butters and creams. A meat grinder for making ground beef or turning otherwise undesirable parts of the animal into a sort of meaty paste that can be more easily consumed.

[valrix]

A meat grinder for ... turning otherwise undesirable parts of the animal into a sort of meaty paste that can be more easily consumed.

 

Rat paste, anyone?

 

On a more serious note, that paste could make for great fishing/trapping bait with less waste.