With so many players now sitting on high Cooking skill after Pilgrim's Bounty, I thought it might be cool to do Cooking's meta-achievement, Hail to the Chef. If you've leveled Cooking solely through the Pilgrim holiday, your character's probably sitting on around 350-ish Cooking, give or take, and completing the meta is well within your grasp with some hard work and perseverance.

Grand Master Cook

You'll need at least 350 Cooking Skill to train up the last rank, but as soon as you do, achievement -- simple as that.

The Cake Is Not A Lie

For better or for worse, getting the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe is pure RNG (and until recently a buddy couldn't complete the meta purely because she hadn't gotten it to drop after more than a year). It's a random reward from any of the Outland or Northrend Cooking dailies, so you can increase the odds of getting the recipe by doing both every day and just hoping it eventually shows up.

Once you've learned it, you'll need the following:

• 8 Simple Flour: Purchased from any Cooking vendor.
• 4 Ice Cold Milk: Purchased from most innkeepers and lots of food vendors across classic Azeroth.
• 4 Mild Spices: Purchased from any Cooking vendor.
• 8 Small Egg: For Alliance, the most convenient place to farm these is off the moonkin in the caves east of Auberdine (Darkshore). For Horde, the most convenient place is off the dragonhawks in Eversong (outside Silvermoon).
• 1 Flask of Port: Purchased from most bartenders or alcohol vendors -- hit the closest tavern.
• 3 Mageroyal: Herbalists can get these on their own, but otherwise, just hit the auction house.

All set? Bake it up, and you've got your achievement.

On a time-sensitive note (as I write this on December 1st), because Small Eggs are required for the upcoming Winter's Veil dishes Gingerbread Cookie and Egg Nog, you may want to set a few aside for yourself if you haven't already done the Winter's Veil meta-achievement. They also sell very well during Winter's Veil, so you can even stock up on them to make a killing on the AH as the holiday approaches.

Kickin' It Up a Notch

If you still need the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe, then you should be doing The Rokk's daily Cooking quests anyway, but if not, just make sure to hit Shattrath once a day and keep at it until you've done all four. Even after you've finished these, you may need to keep at them for both the Cake recipe and --

Captain Rumsey's Lager

Another RNG-dependent achievement, although you can improve your odds by leveling Fishing. The Lager recipe originally dropped only from the reward bags given by the Outland fishing daily, but Blizzard later expanded it to all Cooking and Fishing dailies (Outland and Northrend). The drop rate is said to be relatively high, so be good about your dailies and you should pick it up pretty soon.

Brewing the actual Lager will require a trip to your local tavern for a Skin of Dwarven Stout and a Flagon of Mead.

Our Daily Bread

As with Outland, so with Northrend; you'll need to hang around Dalaran long enough to complete each Dalaran Cooking daily. This should be easy enough, because you'll almost certainly have to do more than a month's worth of Dalaran Cooking dailies to get the awards needed to purchase Northrend recipes.

The Northrend Gourmet

In order to get this achievement done, you're going to have to cook every recipe available in Northrend, whether they're trainable, purchased, or -- in the case of Kungaloosh -- quested. Beyond reaching the requisite skill to get all the trainable recipes (which should happen as a matter of course while you're working on Grand Master), this'll require you to keep doing the Cooking dailies in order to get the Dalaran Cooking Awards necessary to purchase all of the recipes sold by your faction's Dalaran Cooking vendor (located in the Horde or Alliance inns in the city). For convenience's sake, I also hope you've leveled Fishing. If not, now would be the time, because many recipes you'll need for the meta require fish, and this gets expensive quickly if you can't get them yourself.

People often overlook Kungaloosh, which you can only get by questing in and around the Nesingwary Base Camp in Sholazar. After doing this, Grimbooze Thunderbrew will give you the opportunity to do Some Make Lemonade, Some Make Liquor. After completing this small (and fun) chain with the quest The Taste Test, you'll be rewarded with 20 Kungaloosh of your very own but...no recipe? It turns out the actual recipe is taught to you by an NPC in Dalaran's sewers, the Washed-Up Mage, after you've done the Sholazar questline. As for making the actual Kungaloosh for the achievement, the ingredients (Tundra Berries and Savory Snowplum) are sold by most Northrend innkeepers and food vendors.

Time-wise, you should count on doing a month to two months' worth of Dalaran cooking dailies in order to get the requisite number of Awards necessary to purchase (and then make) all of the recipes. How quickly you'll finish will depend on how frequently you get the Mustard Dogs! daily, how many extra Cooking Awards show up in your reward bag, and how many Waterlogged Recipes you get out of Dalaran fishing dailies (assuming you're doing those as well).

Second That Emotion

Interestingly, you don't actually have to cook these foods -- you just have to eat them. However, the odds of finding them on the auction house are pretty low (at least on my server), so bet on having to cook them yourself. Finding the recipes is as easy as questing or doing instances in the locations in Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord -- once you've got the requisite Cooking skill to learn them, they'll show up soon.

Bad Clams: 1 Succulent Clam Meat plus 1 Mote of Shadow

The clams can be fished up just about anywhere in Northrend; Motes of Shadow are drops off several Outland mobs, but the easiest to farm are probably Voidshriekers in Netherstorm. However, with Primal Shadow no longer required for endgame crafting recipes, odds are good that Motes on the AH are fairly cheap if you don't want to make a special trip.

Haunted Herring: 1 Fangtooth Herring plus 1 Essence of Undeath

The Herring can be fished up in both Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord, although it's generally easiest to hit up the Fjord (there are pools of them all over the inland waters). Essence of Undeath is dropped by mobs in Stratholme, Scholomance, and all over the Eastern Plaguelands, but it's usually easiest to get it off the AH.

Last Week's Mammoth: 1 Chunk o' Mammoth

If you can't find a mammoth in Northrend, I don't know what to tell you.

Tasty Cupcake: 2 Simple Flour plus 1 Northern Egg

Simple Flour can be purchased from any Cooking vendor. Northern Eggs can be dropped by most bird mobs in Northrend, although the best rates (approximately 1 in 4) appear to be off Stormcrest Hatchlings in Storm Peaks, Carrion Hunters in Ymirheim (Icecrown), Vargul Plaguetalons in western Zul'drak, and Scourgebeak Fleshrippers in The Fleshwerks (Icecrown).

Once you've got all the materials, cook 'em up, snarf 'em down, and voila -- achievement!

Dinner Impossible

This was added before the introduction of Isle of Conquest, so you're only required to head to 5 of the now 6 existing battlegrounds. Because Feasts are consumed each time you drop one, you'll need to cook 5 of these up, which will require:

• 5 Chunk of Mammoth: You can get these off any mammoth mob in Northrend. Where are they? Throw a rock and hit one.
• 5 Shoveltusk Flank: Farm any Shoveltusk mobs in Howling Fjord; the Flanks are around a 1 in 2 drop rate.
• 5 Worm Meat: The Jormungar mobs in Storm Peaks have the best drop rate, and if you're making a bunch of Great Feasts all in one go, you can save a lot of time by farming both mammoth and worm meat in the Sons of Hodir questing area between Brunnhildar Village and Dun Niffelem.
• 10 Chilled Meat: Personally, I've always had the best luck farming gorillas in Sholazar for these.

All set? Cook up 5 Great Feasts, and start queuing for battlegrounds. Once you're inside one, drop a Feast, and you're all set. You don't actually have to participate in the battleground to get credit for the achievement (although in places like Warsong Gulch it's nice not to leave your team short-handed by immediately leaving the BG after you've dumped a Feast). Repeat until you've got them all covered.

Critter Gitter

This is an absurdly fun achievement, if only for the screenshot potential, but first things first. You'll need at least 10 Critter Bites, which are made with 2 Chilled Meat and 1 Northern Spices per recipe. Luckily, each recipe gives you 4 Bites, so you'll only need to collect 6 Chilled Meat and 3 Spices. Cook up the Bites, and then head wherever you think you'll get the funniest screenshot from collecting 10 critters. The most convenient way to do this is definitely gathering your own flock of penguins from the plentiful supply of birds located off the Northrend coasts, but if you're really lazy, there's typically one such flock northwest of the Argent Tournament grounds, and others are located off the southwestern coast of Howling Fjord, no more than 5 seconds' flight from the Kaskala flight path.

Sous Chef

To be frank, the achievements requiring you to learn a specific number of Cooking recipes are markedly easier (or at least cheaper) for Alliance than they are for Horde, because most of the buyable recipes are sold by Alliance-friendly vendors. At least on my realm, this translates to Alliance selling these recipes at enormous markups on the neutral AH. However, the 100-recipe Sous Chef should still be fairly easy for players of both factions; you'll mostly have to worry about the Horde's apparent distaste for Cooking if you're going for the much harder Chef de Cuisine.

Fortunately, the achievement is also a little easier than it used to be, assuming you have all five recipes from the Pilgrim's Bounty holiday (although you definitely don't need them, even for Chef de Cuisine), so getting to 100 is pretty straightforward assuming you're doing all of the other achievements for the meta:

• Level Cooking to Grand Master and learn all of the trainable recipes.
• Once you reach Outland, make sure you're picking up all of your faction's purchasable recipes (e.g. the smaller recipes typically sold by city Cooking or Fishing vendors, etc.). You'll need to do this anyway for The Outland Gourmet (see below).
• Make sure you quest/instance enough in Howling Fjord and the Borean Tundra to get all four "mood" recipes listed above.
• Assuming you've done these, you should hit 100 Cooking Recipes either before or while buying Dalaran recipes with Dalaran Cooking Awards without having to buy opposite-faction recipes.

This is a list of all the buyable recipes in the game. While doing Chef de Cuisine (the kicked-up version of Sous Chef), the thing that helped me the most was going to the auction house and searching for any Cooking recipes I hadn't yet done. This gave me a handy list of recipes that I still needed, which I then checked against their Wowhead listings to see which vendors sold them, so I could get them at cost rather than (ahem) "retail."

The Outland Gourmet

See that list of buyable recipes above? You're going to have to make sure you've got all of the Outland-purchased ones, in addition to the following:

• Delicious Chocolate Cake: Drops from Outland or Northrend Cooking dailies.
• Stormchops: Drops from Outland or Northrend Cooking dailies.
• Sporeling Snack: You'll have to purchase this from the Sporeggar quartermaster in western Zangarmarsh for 2 Glowcaps (the orange-y mushrooms you'll see all over the place).
• Clam Bar: This is another Sporeggar recipe, but it'll run you 1 Glowcap rather than 2.
• Kibler's Bits: Drops from Outland Cooking dailies.
• Skullfish Soup: Drops from Outland Cooking dailies (but only the Barrel of Fish reward).
• Spicy Hot Talbuk: Drops from Outland Cooking dailies (but only the Crate of Meat reward).

So, as with previous achievements, this one pretty much boils down "Keep doing your Fishing and Cooking dailies," in addition to running around Outland vendors and picking up any recipes you don't have yet. Buy 'em, learn 'em, cook 'em -- and congratulations on your new Chef title!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, Achievements, The Overachiever, Cooking, Guides, Fishing