How The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom made me a better cook

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's (TOTK) inventive recipe system, as well as the introduction of some handy recipe cards, make cooking within the game feel better than ever before. To celebrate these improvements I tried my hand at creating some of these delicious-looking meals for myself.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally here, and with its release comes a plethora of new features and abilities that expand on and improve the foundations laid by Breath of the Wild back in 2017. One such improvement comes to Tears of the Kingdom's cooking system with the introduction of recipe cards that keep track of each new meal you've made and make it easier to replicate them should you have the ingredients. This simple feature is an extremely clever one, as each recipe is stored in a log with over 200 recipes total, this encourages you to experiment with ingredients to fill out your recipe cards, which makes your culinary adventures throughout Hyrule all the more exciting.

Finding new ingredients, discovering old cookbooks or coming across recipes on every new stable wall quickly became some of my favourite moments throughout my travels within Tears of the Kingdom. Holding a bundle of ingredients together, throwing them into a pot and being met with a new meal felt extremely rewarding, especially when I could immediately go check its place within my ever-growing list of recipe cards. Furthermore, many of these cards feature some seriously scrumptious looking meals. This will be no surprise to those familiar with Breath of the Wild's cooking system, but the same level of detail has gone into presenting each recipe within Tears of the Kingdom, all the way down to the appropriate garnish.

All of this excitement over these pixels on the screen started to make me hungry, and also had me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate this kind of inventive experimentation in my own kitchen. With great artwork accompanying each recipe, as well as a handy recipe card to guide me to the general ingredients, I figured cooking some of these meals for myself shouldn't be too difficult. And so, poreing through my recipe cards, I selected six delicious looking meals that I had never made before to try my best to replicate. It should go without saying that the following recipes will give mild spoilers to some of the new ingredients and where to get them within Tears of the Kingdom, but zero information regarding the game's main story will be disclosed. From here it's all about what's good cookin' in Hyrule today, so you can read on without fear of discovering any major spoilers for the game. With that said, let's get into the recipes.

As an additional note, all of the recipes that I crafted, as well as the method I used to cook each dish can be found within a separate blog post here. Within that blog post you can find a pdf. download which outlines each of the recipes I used for every meal in this article. The rest of this article will be showcasing each meal, its score under my scale, as well as any difficulties or particular triumphs I had when creating each one.

In order to begin this culinary adventure, I wanted to set some parameters for the meals I would be making. Firstly, I wanted to use as many of the ingredients that were listed within the recipe cards as possible, and secondly, I wanted to make each meal look as similar to the recipe card photo as possible. These two parameters were occasionally at odds with each other, but I did my best to strike a balance in-between when needs be. Using these guidelines, I am going to give each of my attempts a score by adding together the number of ingredients used (out of the total number of ingredients in the recipe) with my own subjective scoring out of ten for the meal's likeness compared to what we see in-game. I will then divide this number by two in order to find the average and give a final score out of ten. That's a little complicated spelled out, so here's a quick example. If we use three out of five ingredients in a recipe and give a presentation score of eight out of ten then the equation will look like this: (3/5 + 8/10) / 2. Then, completing this equation gives us the overall score of 7/10.

Without any further ado, I started with one of the easiest meals to create within Tears of the Kingdom, the Meat-Stuffed Pumpkin. The only two ingredients here are the Fortified pumpkin, which can be found in Kakariko Village as the description here describes, and  any type of meat, which can be obtained by hunting Hyrule's various wildlife. Of course, you may have noticed a pretty major difference between this recipe and my own interpretation in that there is no pumpkin to be found. Due to the time of TOTK's release, as well as when this article is being written, I could not get my hands on a pumpkin, and instead decided to use bell peppers as the cradle for this meat-filled meal. I also served this with green beans as, unlike the rest of the recipes that follow, these stuffed peppers are hardly a meal on their own. For the meat ingredient I opted for beef mince in a chopped tomato sauce, as I thought it would best replicate the look that we see here in the recipe card. To further this objective, I included both Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce in order to bring the colour of the red tomato closer to the brown meat in the photo. This worked out pretty well, and looks nice against the vibrancy of the bell peppers.

The seasonal issue I ran into however, means that my first category isn't looking great with only 1/2 ingredients used. On the other hand, in terms of presentation, these peppers do a pretty good job of replicating this Kakariko speciality. With each half of the pepper heaped with the beef mince mixture, which has been combined with peas and chopped carrots and garnished with a sprig of basil, all the elements of this recipe's profile is here. Except of course, the eponymous pumpkin. For this reason, as well as the fact that I should've added my vegetables later into the cooking process so that they kept more of their vibrancy, I'm going to score my presentation here at a 6/10. Although I really liked how these came out, and they tasted great, I definitely could've done better with this one. This gives my Meat-Stuffed Peppers an overall score of 5.5/10, thankfully the only way is up from here.

Moving on to a recipe with more ingredients to work with, we have vegetable risotto. Made from Hylian Rice, Goat Butter, Rock Salt and either a carrot or pumpkin. I opted for the Swift Carrot here, which can be obtained in either Hateno or Kakariko Village, and the same goes for the Goat Butter in this recipe. The Hylian Rice can also be bought in Hateno Village general store, or aquired through cutting grass throughout Hyrule. Finally the easiest way to obtain Rock Salt is by breaking ore found in the many caves throughout the game. There were no need for any substitutions for my own recipe here thankfully, so our ingredients used comes to a lovely 4/4. Though I did use other ingredients for the meal, most noticeably vegetable stock for the rice to simmer in, these components of rice, butter, salt and carrots serve as a great anchor for this recipe and it was easy to include all four.

On to the resemblance then, and I'm happy with the result here, too. Though the colour of the rice may not match the vibrancy of the recipe card, I was able to come close by blitzing some of the roasted carrots and adding them to the risotto mixture whilst it cooked. Unfortunately the chunks laid atop this meal in-game proved a little difficult to replicate with my own carrots and my decision to opt for a garnish of thyme over the sprig of basil here takes a couple of points from the presentation. Overall though, I think this looks pretty close, and that it's pretty clearly an imitation, which awards this meal with a hefty score of 8/10 for presentation. Though it's possible that the overall score has been swayed by the fact that this was a very delicious meal, and probably my favourite of the dishes I cooked for this challenge, my overall score for this Vegetable Risotto is definitely an improvement on the last meal, with a huge 9/10.

For our third recipe we have Prime Poultry Pilaf, which once again uses Hylian Rice and Goat butter, with the additions of Raw Bird Thigh and a Bird Egg. Again, Hateno Village is your best bet for the rice and butter aspects of this dish, while the Raw Bird Thigh can be obtained by hunting medium-sized birds throughout Hyrule, and the Bird Eggs are obtainable by finding nests at the tops of various trees throughout the land. Unfortunately, when researching pilaf recipes to create my own, I could not find any than incorporated an egg except for those which boiled an egg on top of the rice as it cooked. Perhaps I could have scrambled an egg into this recipe, but seeing as our in-game recipe card has no visible egg in its image, I omitted the ingredient when making my own meal, giving us an ingredients used of 3/4.

In terms of presentation for this one, I think it's a pretty fair imitation. Covering the chicken in spices and frying it off first, before and it in the oven to cook amidst some butter gave it a great colour very similar to that of the recipe card, and some bright peas and chopped tomatoes gives those tiny pops of colour that we see in the card too. However, I added some medium curry powder to the spices I used in this recipe in order to hopefully deepen yellow colour of the rice to a nice orange like we see in-game, but was definitely too cautious in the amount that I used, as my rice was ultimately still pretty light in colour. Additionally, some very poor watering by me of the plant-in-a-mug basil I bought meant that the herb had completely wilted by the time I cooked this meal, so no garnish for me. With those mistakes I've awarded this meal with a presentation score of 7/10, I think it's still pretty clear what it's meant to be, but some adjustments could've definitely have worked in my favour. That leaves my final score for this Prime Poultry Pilaf at 7.25/10.

For my first and only dessert of this challenge, I picked a recipe new to Tears of The Kingsom, the Cheesecake. For Link, this recipe is made by gathering together Tabantha Wheat, Cane Sugar, Goat Butter and Hateno Cheese and popping them all into a cooking pot. We've covered where to obtain Goat Butter in previous recipes, but the rest of these ingredients are new so I'll cover them individually. Tabantha Wheat can be obtained by cutting grass in the Tabatha Frontier region, or by shopping in Gerudo Town or Rito Village after progressing the Regional Phenomena quests for those areas. Cane Sugar can also be bought in Rito Village, or Goron city.

You may have worked out that the final of these ingredients, Hateno Cheese, can be acquired in Hateno Village, but it isn't as simple as going to the general store like it is for other ingredients. Firstly, you'll have to travel up the hill in Hateno Village and make your way to Hateno Pasture. Here, staring out towards Lake Sumac, you'll find a woman named Koyin who will ask you to retrieve a bottle stranded in the middle of the lake, which will start the 'A Letter to Koyin' Side Adventure. As with many of TOTK's puzzles, you can come up with any number of ways to retrieve this bottle and return it to Koyin, but once you do you, you'll find that it's her grandfather's long lost recipe to Hateno Cheese. Upon returning to the pasture, Koyin will have set up a cheese shop, where you can buy the delicacy for 20 rupees a piece, or trade one for some Fresh Milk if you have a surplus.

When creating my own meal I ran into a couple issues with the ingredients because what I used to make this cake don't align very well with the in-game recipe. For example, the Tabantha Wheat in this Cheesecake represents the base of the, with perhaps some kind of rolled out dough made from sugar and flour. For my own base, I used ginger snaps, a sweet biscuit with a slight ginger tang. These biscuits are made from the flour that this Tabantha Wheat represents, but to say that the two are equivalent seems like a stretch. Additionally, the Hateno Cheese shown within the recipe card seems to be similar to a kind of Swiss cheese and, as tempted as I was to use this savoury cheese, I opted to go down a much more traditional route with a soft cheese. Still technically cheese but definitely not the same thing. Because of these half measures I'm scoring the ingredients used here at a 3/4.

The presentation of this meal was no walk in the park either, as you can see above. With a terrible slice cut from the tray (yes this was the best I could do), the lack of any base around the sides of the cheesecake, as well as a forgotten sprig of mint, my sad little triangle here pales in comparison to the magnificent artwork of the recipe card. My dollop of raspberry sauce is mostly okay, and the colour comes pretty close, but with those comments as this presentation's greatest compliments, I've awarded this dessert with a presentation score of a very fair 3/10. This puts my final score at 5.25/10, but don't let that put you off if you're attempting any of these recipe's yourself, as this cheesecake tasted great, especially with the raspberry sauce on the side.

Continuing with another new recipe which uses Hateno Cheese, we have Cheesy Risotto. This recipe is made with Hylian Rice, Goat Butter, Rock Salt, Hateno Cheese, and any type of fish. It should be noted that despite the description of this recipe specifying either fish or mushroom, the Cheesy Risotto can only be obtained when cooked with fish in-game and using any kind of mushroom in its place will result in the player obtaining Mushroom Risotto instead. For my recipe I used Hyrule Bass, which can be found in abundance at the Bottomless Pond in Hyrule field.

In terms of the ingredients I used for my own recipe, this is another tricky case where the ingredients listed don't quite match the meal presented in the recipe card. Despite the fact that this Cheesy Risotto requires fish to be made, there's no seafood to be seen in the art provided, and I felt that including it in my own recipe would create something that looked very different to the image I was attempting to match. Therefore, the fish was omitted when I created my own meal, but all other ingredients were pretty straightforward and easy to incorporate which gives me a respectable 4/5 for ingredients used.

Presentation however, is where things start to slip. I was excited for this recipe to create those great crispy cheese slices that we can see within the recipe card, but my own attempts were much less impressive. Despite trying to shape the cheese into triangles before popping them in the oven, I ended up with some very circular melted mounds, which easily lost their form when placed into the heat of the risotto, leaving them to fold down rather than stand tall as seen in the recipe card. This was very disappointing, and to further my dismay the colouring here is pretty lacklustre, too. The darkness of the recipe card was definitely difficult to mimic in my own meal, and left my risotto looking a little too anaemic. Because of this I'm scoring the presentation here at a 5/10, an effort was made and I think my garnish comes pretty close, but it's got nothing on Link's version. That leaves the final score for this dish at a 6.5/10, so there's definitely improvements to be made! 

The final meal I created was perhaps one of the most exciting new recipe's introduced in Tears of the Kingdom: Hylian Tomato Pizza. This recipe just looks great, and it was discovering this meal in-game that gave me the idea for this article. Anyway, let's get into the ingredients, Hateno Cheese and Tabantha Wheat make a return here with the final ingredient being Hylian Tomato, which can be obtained in may places in Hyrule, but I found my first in the outskirts of Hateno Village. The Raw Meat aspect seen in the recipe card above is the result of my in-game experimentation with this recipe, and is not a required ingredient for its creation.

With my own recipe I didn't run into any issues here, with the wheat for the flour base, the tomatoes for the sauce and toppings and of course the cheese on top, this was an easy 3/3. Additionally, this recipe was a particular joy to make, rolling the dough and stretching out my own pizza base felt pretty rewarding and tasted great, too!

In terms of presentation, there are a couple of notes here. Firstly, I skipped the sliced olives, no excuse this time I just personally don't like them and couldn't bare to put them on my pizza even if it meant loosing some points for presentation. In lieu of this I did add some sliced ham to round out my meal, which alters the presentation slightly, but overall doesn't make too much of a difference. Overall, I was very happy with how this one came out though this may be partially due to my relief that I could actually roll the dough into something circular. All in all though, the sliced tomatoes and green bell pepper match up nicely to the recipe card, which gives the presentation of my pizza an 8/10. Thankfully this means that we can end on a high, with my final meal receiving an overall score of 9/10.

That about wraps up my Hyrulian cooking journey, and what an adventure it was. All of these meals were a serious joy to cook and even better to eat, so feel free to try any of them for yourself following the recipe sheet if you're interested. In any case, there's clearly a lot of fun to have with food in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and I really have to commend how exciting and creative this minor little function can be. Heat resistance meals and sneaky elixirs are great, but I'm so glad that Nintendo spent so much time making the cooking in this game so in-depth and fun. Let me know if you think any of my tributes to these meals should have scored higher or lower than they did, or if you decide to follow any of these recipes yourself. Most importantly though, make sure you boot up your Zelda save file, pore through your ingredients and start experimenting with your own meals. After all, you can't make an omelette without first creating a few Dubious Foods.