Cooking

(F2P) (P2P)

The Cooking skill is used to cook raw food for a number of reasons, including restoring life points and the temporary boosting of skill levels. There are many different types of food in RuneScape, each healing a certain amount of life points. However, as with all skills, players must reach certain levels to cook various types of foods. Cooking is a very popular skill to raise because of its economic benefits. Cooking can generate a great profit as many players are willing to purchase food already cooked, especially those who cannot actually prepare higher level foods. Cooking also has a larger variety of training options than any other skill.

Cooking is considered by most players to be one of, if not actually the easiest skill to train. This is due to being able to simply buy the items they want to cook from the Grand Exchange and then cook it merely a few feet away. Unfortunately this method will usually not generate a profit for the player, actually requiring a rather large investment. As such, a multitude of wealthier players are often seen training cooking this way, while less fortunate players are forced to manually gather their raw foods. However, it should be noted that some foods available in the cooking skill require significantly more work than other skills, perhaps most notably the mushroom potato, and that if one was so inclined he or she could find endless diversity in the cooking skill; despite this, most players choose to cook fish. Cooking is the second most common 99 skill, after Strength.

How to cook


Cooking is known as one of the fastest skills to train in RuneScape, as players can cook in many different ways as well as being able to simply buy their raw food items from the Grand Exchange. Before the Grand Exchange was created, the bulk of players usually fished and then cooked their catches. Generally a player who is manually gathering their raw items will cook their food items on a local campfire created through the Firemaking skill near where they are gathering, or take the items they have obtained to a range and cook there. Ranges (which provide a lower burn rate) can be easily located and are almost always well labeled on the map as a cooking pan icon. There are other assorted things that a player can cook on, such as Sulphur Vents, Permanent Campfires as seen in NPC camps, or on Iron Spits. It is important to note that only meat, fish and stew can be cooked on an open fire. Foods like bread, cake, and pie must be cooked on a proper range, Most of these food items will generate an error message if the player attempts to cook it improperly while others, such as raw potatoes, will simply all burn. Raw foods loosely related to hunting, such as raw beast meat, raw chompy, and rabbit must be cooked on an iron spit.

To actually cook something, players have to "use" their raw food item on a range or a campfire. If they have more than one food item of the same kind in their inventory, a picture of the food item will appear in the dialogue box. The player can right click on the picture and select how much he/she wants to cook from the up/down icon on the upper-right corner. By default, you cook all the selected raw/uncooked item.

If this is your first time cooking follow these steps for maximum effect:
 * Cook on the Lumbridge range, as there is a bank directly upstairs.
 * If you do not want to spend much money in this skill, you can kill cows and cook the raw meat on the range or a fire.

Burning
As players train cooking, they will periodically and randomly fail to cook something properly. The result is a burnt version of the item that the player was attempting to cook. As an example, if a player tries to cook a raw shark and burns it they will obtain the item 'burnt shark.' The same holds true for items such as burnt cake, burnt meat, and burnt fish, where the item name holds the general form 'burnt [something].'

As you increase your cooking level beyond what is required for that particular food, you will gradually burn less, as is made obvious by the logic of getting better at cooking. With many raw items, especially lower to mid level items, you will eventually stop burning some types of food entirely, but will often need an extensive amount of training to reach the appropriate zero-burn level. An example being raw monkfish, which is accessed at Cooking level 62 does not reach zero-burn until level 92, 30 levels higher. Other than increasing your cooking level, there are several methods of decreasing the chance of burning.

Burnt food items are completely worthless, and cannot be sold on the Grand Exchange. They are tradeable, but retain their uselessness and the minimum trade value of 1gp each. An update to the shops system guaranteed that any item sold was worth at least 1 gold piece, so players can now offload their burnt food at the general store for 1 coin each, which is generally minuscule compared to the amount it can cost a player to purchase the raw food item.

The lists below provide both the minimum requirements for cooking the item as well as the level at which the item will no longer be burnt. Some of the high level foods never reach the 'no-burn' point, with the list including items on the level magnitude of raw shark. As such, some players choose to wait before beginning to cook foods they have just met the requirements for, as they will usually burn more than half of the food they are trying to cook. Burning food provides NO experience, so it is something to be avoided in earnest.


 * Fires have the greatest chance of burning food, but possesses the advantage of on-the-spot flexibility. Avoiding cooking on a campfire will decrease your chances of burning your foods.


 * Standard ranges have a lesser chance of burning food as compared with using fires, but cannot be made anywhere like a fire. If a player wishes to burn less food, they can seek out a range. The only downside is that they cannot be used on-the-spot, so running back and forth to the bank, and the time/distance from and to the bank must be taken into account to maximize productivity.


 * The "Cooking range" on the ground floor of Lumbridge castle has the special distinction of some sort of enchantment that decreases the rate of food burning when cooked on it. Its anti-burning bonus is not especially large, but is significant especially when a player is near or at a level where their chosen food items tend to burn a lot. Access to this range is granted through the completion of the low level quest Cook's Assistant, but its location could be slightly more convenient, even with a bank is two floors above. Members have the option of completing at least part of the quest Recipe for Disaster which grants the player access to a bank chest in the celler of the castle, a mere one floor down.


 * Members wearing the Cooking gauntlets obtained during the Family Crest quest will be awarded a lower burn rate for fish, including Lobsters, Monkfish, Swordfish, Sharks, Cavefish, and Rocktails anywhere that they are cooked, such as campfires. It is unclear if the Cooking gauntlets and Lumbridge range anti-burning bonuses complement each other, but the general knowledge suggests that they do stack. The information on the exact anti-burning bonus of the Cooking gauntlets is based on statistical data and has not officially been proven by Jagex, but it is fairly reliable.


 * The Bake Pie lunar spell will never burn a pie. The only drawback is that, as per its name, it is only effective for cooking pies. Players may choose to assemble a large number of pies and cook them all without ever moving a single step, train both magic and cooking skills at the same time. This is extremely useful for high level pies which tend to burn at a high rate, but is very complex compared to regular cooking and requires a substantial amount of questing and mage training. Bake pie is members only.

Items needed
As cooking is the skill of turning food from raw to edible, and there is a very wide range of available food types in Runescape, there are many items that players need in order to cook food. Depending on what you are cooking you will need a variety of items such as water or flour. Listed below are the cardinal cooking items which are used to make the most common types of food.
 * Fish - (raw lobster, raw trout, etc.)
 * Flour - (Held in a pot)
 * Water - (Held in a bucket, bowl, vial or jug)
 * Milk - (Held in a bucket)
 * Meat - (Raw meat, Raw rat meat, Raw bear meat, Raw yak meat, Raw chicken)
 * Vegetables - (Cabbages, Grain, Onions, Potatoes)
 * Fruits - (Cooking apple, Grapes, Banana, Redberries, Tomatoes)
 * Cheese
 * Bowl
 * Bucket
 * Cake tin
 * Jug
 * Pie dish
 * Pot
 * Knife

Meat
Players can obtain basic meat from killing chickens, cows, bears, yaks, and giant rats. While raw chicken, which then becomes cooked chicken looks a little different, the item uses are identical (e.g., stew.) When a player cooks raw beef, raw bear meat, or raw rat meat, the all three become simply 'cooked meat.' If meat is used on the fire after it is already cooked, it will become burnt and a message will say, "You deliberately burn the nicely cooked meat." This yields no Cooking experience. Raw and cooked meat may also be purchased at the Grand Exchange in Varrock, certain shops, and from other players.

Fish
Fish are the most common food to cook in RuneScape due to the ease of gathering them, resulting in huge stock available. They heal a great amount of life points and are the recommended food for surviving in an average combat situation. Fish can be easily obtained from fishing, or bought in large amounts from other players. Many players who are power-levelling use high-level fish to gain maximum experience per hour.

* Numbers in parentheses indicate the level at which fish will no longer burn while wearing cooking gauntlets. This only affects lobster, swordfish, shark, cavefish, and rocktail.

** Note that lobsters will not burn on the Lumbridge range at level 73 Cooking, as opposed to 74 while using a normal range.

*** In a sample of 3,065 raw monkfish cooked at level 89 Cooking while using cooking gauntlets, a total of 20 were burnt. This has now been confirmed by multiple players.

Snails
A sub-type of meat, snails can be cooked by Members. Raw snail meat is obtained by killing snails in the Mort Myre swamp and the neighbouring Haunted Woods, Near the village of Canifis in Morytania. There are more snails in the eastern and southern parts of the swamp than in the Haunted Forest, especially the area known as the winding path. Once a player has found a snail, simply kill it and take the meat for cooking. The first two kinds of snail have a variable heal rate, meaning they do not always heal the same exact amount, but instead have a specific range of life point values that they will restore. There are other foods that have similar effects, such as cave eel.

Bread
Bread making is done by simply combining a pot of flour with either a jug of water or a bucket of water. When the someone does this, they will be prompted with the option to make several different types of dough. Select the desired type, then quantity, to make the actual dough. Not all types of dough are directly cook-able, but those that are can only be cooked on a range, not on a fire made via the Firemaking skill. Once cooked on the range, regular bread is complete. Other types of dough, such as pitta bread and pastry dough have further steps until completion.

Pies
Pies are a food that a player must eat in two bites. Similar to pizzas, a player will eat only half of the pie at once, and garner the full benefits related to the pie (a player does not need to eat the whole pie to gain relevant stat boosts). After eating the first half of the pie, the player will obtain the aptly named 'half-pie,' which, once consumed, will revert back to an empty pie dish. Pies allows more life point replenishing power to be crammed into less inventory space, and are often used to give players a bit more health per capita. For example, when a player eats the first half a redberry pie, they will gain 50 Life Points (LP). The other half will stay in the dish, which can be consumed later for an additional 50 LP. Stat boosting pies work the same way, however, the separate boosts do not stack.

To make pies, players firstly need to mix a Pot of flour and Water together and select make Pastry dough. Players then use the Pastry dough with an empty Pie dish, to create a 'pie shell.' It should be noted that as it is, pie shells are fairly valuable and well sought after. Once the player has obtained the pie shell, the player just needs to add the appropriate fillings to make the uncooked pie they are after which then needs to be cooked. Where the individual ingredients are edible, the player may add the pie shell, or part pie, to the ingredients to avoid accidentally eating them.

A pie may be cooked on a range as well as by the bake pie spell in the Lunar Spellbook with no chance of burning. Burnt pies need not be discarded as they can be emptied, and the pie dish can be reused. Once cooked, the pie is complete, but players should be aware that if they accidentally eat half of it, there is a very low chance of selling the resulting half-pie. Although it has been noted that there was a spike in price for "half-pie" Summer's Pie during the pie shortage in the beginning of the second age.

Stew
To make stew, players will need a bowl and some cooked meat or cooked chicken. The bowl has to be filled with Water, from any water source other than a well. The potatoes or cooked meat can be added next, in any order. Gathering and cooking meat is discussed above. Potatoes are found in various locations, generally in the fields around Lumbridge and Draynor where they grow. Members have additional ways of obtaining potatoes, including the Farming skill and various shops, especially the grocery shops in the Grand Tree and Yanille. If a member is attempting to make curry, the curry leaves or spice must be added before cooking the stew. Once all the ingredients have been added to the bowl, cook the stew on a range. Stews may not be cooked on fires.

Pizza
Pizza is a very popular food choice for players who regularly engage in combat, as they heal large amounts of Life points. Pizzas are a very famous choice for players training the Slayer skill not only because of the amount of life points they heal but because, like pies, they are consumed in two bites. Players can eat one half and save the other half for when it is needed, essentially stacking two food items in one inventory spot. To make a pizza, mix flour and water, selecting the pizza base dough type. Once you have the pizza base, add a Tomato and a Piece of Cheese to make a Plain Pizza. Both a tomato and a slice of cheese can be taken from Aggie the Witch's house in Draynor Village north of the bank; however, this method is very time consuming. It can also be obtained in the Bandit Camp (Wilderness). They can also be bought from the food store in Port Sarim and the Culinaromancer's Chest. After obtaining a plain pizza, the pizza must be baked. After baking, It is possible to add various toppings to the pizza, which is a popular money-making method despite offering relatively low experience for simply topping the pizza. Pizzas are very useful for skills such as agility where the player takes constant damage.

Cake
Cakes are mildly complicated to make, and use several items at once making their assembly rather slow. One slice of cake does not generate a large restoration on its own. Once complete, cakes are eaten in three bites. Eating one or two pieces of a cake will result in either a 2/3 cake or 1/3 cake. The 1/3 and 2/3 cake items cannot be used on one another to reassemble a full cake. The total value of the LP they restore is divided equally among the 3 parts. To actually make a cake, players need a pot of flour, an egg, a bucket of milk, and a cake tin. Eggs are found near the chicken coops around Lumbridge, while milk can be obtained by milking dairy cows into buckets. Dairy cows are found near the combat level 2 cows around Lumbridge, and also on a farm south of Falador, which also houses a churn. When all four items are present, using one on one of the others will combine all four into the cake tin at once. This must then be cooked on a range, and cannot be cooked on a fire. Please note that unlike pies the cake becomes separated from the cake tin when cooked, therefore players cannot cook a full inventory of 28 at once. 14 uncooked cakes will result in 14 cakes as well as 14 cake tins in your inventory. After being cooked, a Cake can be embellished with chocolate by using a Chocolate Bar, or Chocolate Dust to the cake.

Potato Toppings
Potato Toppings are members only. Potato toppings greatly increase the amount which a potato heals. Toppings can all be eaten as is, but restore less than half of what the complete potato/topping combo would restore.

Baked Potato
Baking potatoes is members only. To add the topping to a potato, a raw potato must be cooked. Once cooked, add a Pat of Butter to the Potato. This makes a Buttered Potato. Add the topping of your choice to a buttered potato to make a very potent healing item. The tuna and sweetcorn potato is one of the 10 best food items in the game, healing 220 LP in one bite. These items sell for a very high amount, as they entail a large amount of work to create and heal such high amounts. Note that experience here denotes total experience gained for making each item from the raw ingredients. For information on the experience gained for combining items, see the respective item's page.

Dairy
Dairy products can only be made on Members' worlds with a Dairy churn. A Dairy churn is found on the farm south of Falador, the cooking guild just south of the Grand Exchange and at several other locations. If a player is contemplating a major churning project, it is worth noting that churning is very slow work. Also, as the bucket and dairy item are both retained, all things made at the churn can only be made in sets of 14, along with 14 empty buckets. The buckets do get automatically dropped if the player's inventory is full, so 28 can be churned in one go, if the player does not mind the loss of the buckets.

Wine
Wine is made from a jug of water and a bunch of grapes. Grapes can be found in the Cooking guild, In the Phoenix Gang's hideout, as a common drop from Guards, or members can steal them from Fortunato's Fine Wine in Draynor Village at level 22 Thieving; members who have completed a portion of Recipe for Disaster can obtain grapes from the Culinaromancer's chest. Members cannot grow grapes with the Farming skill. Jugs can be found in a large variety of places, including a spawn point on the top floor of the Cooking Guild. Simply use grapes on the jug of water to make Unfermented Wine. Approximately ten seconds later, the wine will ferment and either be drinkable, or go bad. Wine gives 200 experience for a good jug, and none for a bad jug. If you make the maximum amount of jugs in one trip (14) successfully, you will get 2800 experience. An interesting historical note, Wine was once consumed in two doses, but this ability has been discontinued. Half jugs of wine, known formally as Half full wine jug, can still be purchased on the grand exchange, but are worth several million gold pieces each as there is no longer any way to produce them.

Hot drinks
The only hot drink is nettle tea, which is members only. To make nettle tea, players need first a bowl of water. Next, nettles are needed. Nettles are located near the prison along the road between the Wizard's Tower and Draynor Village, south-east of the slayer master in Canifis, or next to the yew trees in Edgeville. It is important to note that nettles will hurt players when they pick them up unless they are wearing leather type gloves (decorative types of gloves do not work.) The nettles have to be used with the bowl of water to make nettle-water. The nettle-water next has to be boiled on a range to turn it into nettle tea. The tea can then be poured into an empty cup. Empty cups can be bought or stolen from the tea stall in Varrock or by speaking to Brother Galahad, located east of the coal trucks. Also, if a player wants to add milk to their tea, they can obtain some milk in a bucket and use it with the tea. Adding milk is optional and has no real benefits, an amusing reflection of real life.

Brewing
Brewing involves the fermenting of raw ingredients into ales or cider. Brewing may be considered quite useful since most of the ales boost certain stats. This can also make a number of ales valuable. It is, however, quite a slow process and so is not a viable means of training. The products are not useful for healing unlike most areas of cooking. There are two types of brew that can be made - ales and cider.

To brew ales, you have to use the fermenting vats located in either of the breweries in either Keldagrim or Port Phasmatys. Each place has only one vat, in which one ale can be brewed at a time. To start brewing ale, 2 buckets of water, 2 lots of Barley malt, the main ale ingredient, and a pot of ale yeast must be added to the fermenting vat (in that order). The main ingredient is specific to the type of ale being brewed. Once the ale yeast is added, the ale will begin fermenting. This will usually take several days to brew. Once it is done brewing, you can turn the valve between the vat and the attached barrel to move brewed ale to the barrel, and then collect the ale in Beer glasses or calquat kegs. The barrel will produce 8 doses of the ale. Ale in calquat kegs are in most cases considerably more valuable.

To make cider, you should first take 16 apples and 4 buckets to the cider barrel at one of the breweries in either Keldagrim or Port Phasmatys. 4 cooking apples should be added to and mushed in the barrel. An empty bucket should then be used to collect it in a bucket. Once 4 buckets are filled, add them to the fermenting vat, then add ale yeast into the fermenting vat. It will then start fermenting.

During the brewing process, it is possible for an ale to mature instead of brewing normally, in which case your fermenting vat will produce mature versions of the ales you have brewed, which have stronger effects—it is also possible, however, for an ale to turn bad, in which case the ale in your fermenting vat will become unusable.

All of the brews boost a certain skill, as shown in the table below. Some of the brews have a variable boost amount which is relative to the players level, boosting more as the players level increases.

* For a Mature Ale: Simply add +1 (or -1) to all stat effects of the basic ale. Example: Slayer's respite (m) Slayer: +2, Attack: -3, Strength: -3.

Gnome Cooking
Gnome cooking is very complicated, and is best left with its own specially dedicated guide. The gnome foods plays a big part in the Gnome Restaurant activity, more detailed information can be found in article linked to above but following is a general guide for how a player can get acquainted with gnome cooking.

Although it is complex, somewhat expensive, and requires a wide variety of unusual ingredients, gnome cooking can provide a good avenue to advance cooking from around 10 up to about 30 in good speed. To obtain the cookbook with all the recipes for gnome foods, a player can go to The Grand Tree in the Gnome Stronghold and find the gnome called Aluft Gianne Sr. He is on the west side of the first level up of the grand tree and is dressed as a chef. Talk with him, and offer your assistance to him. He will take you on as a kind of apprentice and tell you some basics, give you the recipe book and a small set of the basic tools you need to create gnome dishes. He will assign you a succession of dishes to prepare. Once you have prepared the dish to his satisfaction he will ask you to make another, then another moving steadily up the chart of assorted gnome foods. If you are using this method to train your cooking up and get an assignment you do not have the correct level to prepare, then you simply need to train till you do. Use the shops and resources in the gnome stronghold to make more gnome foods if you wish, or cook other foods that you may have. For each dish the player can buy supplies from the shop run by a gnome called Hudo who is found by the cooking range nearby Gianne, but ever since the shop stock update this has been severely limited. Players going through the tutorial will start by making crunchies which can stored at a bank in The Grand Tree and later sold on the Grand Exchange. As your skill levels improve you will be able to make battas then eventually bowls. Once you have completed the training exercises he gives you, you can start the Gnome Cooking activity, which has several useful rewards.

Temporary boosts

 * Chef's delight is a type of beer made by players which temporarily increases Cooking level by 1-5 levels when drunk (5% of base cooking level + 1).
 * Chef's delight (m) does the same as a normal chef's delight but with an added boost of +1, making the boost 2 to 6.
 * Orange Spicy stew raises cooking level by up to 6 which does not stack with other boosts, but can also randomly have the opposite effect and lower it by 6, which does stack. This allows the possibility of completely draining your cooking level if one does not use recovery methods such as super restore potions or Blood drain scrolls.
 * Equipping a cooking cape boosts cooking from 99 to 100.

Cooking Cape of Accomplishment
You can buy this skillcape from the Head Chef at the Cooking Guild that is slightly west of Varrock once you reach 99 Cooking.


 * A Chef's Hat or the possession of Varrock Armour 3 (This doesn't need to be equipped or even held - Can be in your bank) is required for entry to the Cooking Guild. From here, a player must pay 99,000 coins for the cooking skillcape. If you already have a cooking skillcape, it can be used in place of a Chef's Hat for entry to the Cooking Guild.

Trivia

 * There was a bug after the first update of 2 September 2009, during which people could cook 50% faster. This bug was fixed in a later update that day.
 * Due to a update on the 9 August 2011, the cooking time for a inventory was slowed down by 5 ingame ticks.
 * There was a bug some time in 2006 that when players tried to cook Lobsters on the range next to the Fletching shop in Catherby, they would never burn it. This was exploited by players training Cooking on the range nearby. Since there was a bank right next door, players flocked here to train cooking. This was fixed a few days later. No action was taken against the players who exploited this glitch.
 * Before Fishing was added in June 2001, the experience for cooking meat depended on the player's cooking level, namely, 25 + 1.75 * level.
 * Before pies were added in March 2001, the amount of healing provided by bread and meat (the only food available at the time) depended on the player's Cooking level.
 * In the far past burnt foods were a choice item for scam artists, with scams such as burnt lobsters being sold for outrageous prices, advertised as 'rare grey lobsters.' Being, indeed grey, but by no means rare or at all valuable the scammers made large quantites of illegitimate money with this tactic. This sort of scamming is one of the primary reasons that Jagex has instituted the strict trade was in place until a recent update, and is a severe offence of the magnitude required to garner severe punishments such as banning on players attempting it in earnest. Luckily this sort of scam has largely fallen to the wayside, at last thwarted by Jagex's security measures.
 * At level 55 Cooking on ranges without cooking gauntlets when cooking salmon, you will always have one burnt fish in your inventory at the end of each trip.
 * Prior to the removal of random events, in one of Evil Bob's random events, players were teleported to ScapeRune and were forced to uncook fish. However, you did not lose Cooking experience in doing so. If you had cooked food in your inventory, and tried to uncook it, you will say," I need Uncooking skill of at least 70 to attempt that." Followed by "Wait, I don't even have an Uncooking skill."
 * In the Rogue's Den, there is a fire very close to a bank. This makes it a very popular and efficient spot for training cooking. A player can manage to trap the banker on the fire, this requires a player to talk to him leaving him standing still until that player moves. This will enable players to cook exceptionally fast.
 * The Cauldron displayed when the player gains a cooking level is a Troll Cauldron which are usually used to cook humans.
 * The Cooking noise made when Cooking in RuneScape Classic was a recording of Andrew Gower's mother frying bacon in their kitchen at home.
 * Before Cook-X update which took place 12 September 2005, people had to manually cook every product. At that time there were only around 700 accounts with 99 Cooking.