Tales of the Shire Cooking guide

Cooking is an integral part of Tales of the Shire, and there’s more to it than just slopping ingredients together and calling it good. Sharing Meals together is a key component of the game, but sometimes the Hobbits you call neighbors want something ridiculous that may not be easy to put together. They may want a Sour meal, but you don’t have the ingredients to necessarily do that easily enough.

Not everything about the Cooking system of Tales of the Shire is explained thoroughly, so we’re going to go over everything we know about it. Cooking is already pretty easy at the start of the game, but the deeper you go into the Cooking Club, the more tools you get for your kitchen, making it an important club, if you value cooking.

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How to cook for Hobbits in Tales of the Shire

At first in Tales of the Shire, you’ll have a limited number of recipes you can use in the Cooking system. However, as you build friendships with the other Hobbits, they’ll share some of their favorite recipes with you. That will increase the number of things you can cook, until you have a rich, full cookbook of ideas.

Cooking begins with knowing what you want to prepare (Image via Take-Two Interactive)

Step 1 is to figure out what you want to cook. Just head to your kitchen and interact with the cookware to open up your cookbook. It’s divided into many sections, and if you’re cooking the day of a Shared Meal, you’ll also have a Cravings tab, filled with the currently craved meals for each guest, and what type of flavor they want to have.

Some meals have a default flavor, while others are more malleable. Each ingredient has a color coding, that denotes what flavor it is:

• Purple: Sweet
• Red: Spicy
• Green: Sour
• Blue: Salty
• Grey: Bitter

If you have more of one flavor type than the others, that becomes the default flavor of the meal. However, you can season foods with various cookware (as long as you have the seasonings), to change an ingredients flavor. For example, you can take Pork, which is salty by default, and apply Rosemary in the frying pan, to make it Bitter instead. This is an important thing to know when trying to adjust the flavor of a meal to satisfy someone.

Since this meal is predominantly Bitter ingredients, we know what to expect. (Image via Take-Two Interactive)

After you’ve picked a meal, then you need to pick your ingredients. If you’re just cooking to level up cooking, and not to satisfy someone, pick whichever ingredients speak to you. Many dishes have required ingredients (EG: specific fish), but other times you have more of a say-so. If, for example, someone craves a Rich Rhubarb Pie, but also wants something sweet, you can use the proper berries to make the neutral flavor into Sweet.

Rhubarb is a Sour flavor, but with the right berries it can become something else. Another thing to keep in mind is that the higher rating an ingredient has (more stars), the higher chance you have of making a higher-tier dish, up to five stars.

Once you’ve picked your ingredients, it’s time to put them together. One of the more confusing things about cooking in Tales of the Shire is how much you need to dice something on the chopping board. In the example above, you can see the Mutton aligns perfectly with the star icon. That star icon is the ideal way you want to put this meal together.

Your dish won't be a failure if you don't dice enough, but it does potentially make it have a higher rating in the end (Image via Take-Two Interactive)

If you have to dice something, and it’s in the perfect location, dice until the arrow is dead center between the red and blue sides. If you want it to lower, and get chunkier, you chop closer to the end of red. Conversely, if you want it finer, go above the blue. It takes some getting used to, but you’ll get the hang of it.

After you’ve diced something, you’ll be able to put it in the frying pan if you need to make it more tender. The longer you leave it in the pan, the closer to tender it will go. Just use the interact button to toss it until you’re satisfied. It won’t go all the way to the end in one go; it will take multiple ingredients being put in the pan to go all the way over.

It takes practice, but you'll be a master chef in no time (Image via Take-Two Interactive)

Before you fry something, or put it in any of the other cooking dishes you have access to, you’ll have the ability to season the ingredient. This is how you change its flavor, if you need to do so. There are also flavor combos that get a bonus, which we’ll cover below. Some ingredients just need to be added to the bowl in the early game. As you level up the Cooking Club, you’ll gain access to even more cooking utensils that will up your game even further.

Then you simply rinse and repeat until the meal has the desired consistency, put the ingredients together, and you have a meal to share in Tales of the Shire!

From there, you just need to choose whether to store it in the pantry or your inventory. If you’re going to share a meal with someone soon in Tales of the Shire, I’d just throw it in the inventory.

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All known Flavor Combos in Tales of the Shire’s Cooking system

Knowing which flavors work best together is a key facet of being a master in the kitchen (Image via Take-Two Interactive)

Tales of the Shire Cooking dishes can be textured, flavorful, or well-balanced, depending on the flavoring combos they have. Simply having multiple flavors together can grant textured, but if you want flavorful, you have to have the proper combos of flavors. Well-balanced comes from having no two flavors out-power the other (eg: four-ingredient meal and two of each flavor profile). You can still get flavorful combo bonuses from a well-balanced meal.

There are several confirmed flavorful combos in the game, found in the game’s menu as you explore the various recipes. However, we’ve already figured out all of them. If gaining more cooking utensils adds more flavor profiles, we’ll update this accordingly, but our cookbook looks to be complete on the flavor combos:

• Salty+Spicy
• Salty+Sweet
• Sweet+Spicy
• Sweet+Sour
• Sweet+Bitter
• Sour+Spicy

If you cook a meal with just two flavors in Tales of the Shire — specifically the combos above — they gain a flavorful bonus and will improve the quality of the meal. This isn’t always going to be possible, depending on the ingredients and seasonings you have on hand, but I recommend going for them when possible.

With this information in mind, cooking is going to be a breeze in Tales of the Shire. It’s up to you what you cook, when you cook it, and what flavors you add to it. However, knowing the flavor combos, and basics of the system will allow you to master cooking, and start cranking out delicious meals that your fellow Hobbits will love.

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Check out our other Tales of the Shire guides and features

• Tales of the Shire: The Water That Roars Riddle Solution
• Tales of the Shire: How to easily make money
• Tales of the Shire review