Genshin Impact – How to Cook Meals and Process Ingredients

Genshin Impact is what you’d get if you made Breath of the Wild into a gacha game, and that means you’ll need to cook meals and process ingredients if you wish to keep your party’s health topped up. Unlike Breath of the Wild, you won’t be tossing random items into a pot to see what delicacy comes out. In Genshin Impact, cooking is all about recipes. Similar to BotW, however, is where you can prepare a hearty meal.

Genshin Impact – cook meals and prepare ingredients at cooking fires.

You’ll know these when you see them: either a pot or wok will be resting over an open flame, and you’ll receive a “Cook” prompt when near it. As long as the flame is lit you can cook, so if you accidently extinguished it use a fire attack to rekindle the flames. From here you’ll be brought to the cooking menu in Genshin Impact.

There are two tabs here, though you’d be forgiven for not noticing this at the start. At the tippy top (or left on mobile) of Genshin Impact’s cooking menu are two icons: the pot and the pepper. The pot is the general cooking tab, where all of your known recipes will be on display. The pepper leads to the “Process” list, though more on that in a bit.

To cook meals all you need is the correct recipe and proper ingredients (recipes are found at the Good Hunter restaurant, from quests, and out in the world). If a meal can be prepared it will be fully illuminated within the cooking menu, and if you are short any of the required items it will be grayed out. Select “Cook” to bring up the recipe, and you’ll see a proficiency level: each successfully cooked “Perfect” meal will increase this by 1, and at max proficiency you’ll unlock “auto-cook”, allowing you to prepare that dish at whatever quantity you so desire. You can also change which character will do the work (some characters come with bonuses to cooking, such as Xiangling).

Until you unlock “auto-cook” you’ll need to complete a simple mini-game, so select “Cook” again to get started. The mini-game is simple: stop the spatula in the light golden segments to complete the meal, and the orange portion for a “Perfect” meal. Remember, cook a “Perfect” meal in Genshin Impact to not only increase the rarity and bonuses of your meals, but to progress your proficiency with that item.

Ingredients are simpler: you’re processing items into more useful materials for cooking. In Genshin Impact, ingredients are queued: select the item you want (say, flour), select “Cook”, the amount to process, then wait until the timer runs out. You can either wait on every item to process, or grab them one by one. You can only queue up to 99 ingredients at a time, but can grab them from any cooking fire in the world. So, feel free to “Process” some ingredients, then set out about your business. And there you have it: that’s how you cook meals and process ingredients in Genshin Impact.