Cooking in Tales of the Shire – Beginner Guide

Cooking in Tales of the Shire is the heart of the game. It’s how you’ll make friends, help Bywater flourish, and become a proper Hobbit chef. If you want to impress your neighbors, you’ll need to learn your way around a kitchen.

This guide gets straight to the point, covering the cooking basics to get you started on your culinary journey.

Contents

• Stocking the Pantry: How to Get Ingredients
• The Art of Hobbit Cooking: Your First Meal
• Understanding Flavors and Combos
• Meals, Mail, and Making Friends
• Beginner Cooking Showcase

How to Get Ingredients for Cooking in Tales of the Shire

You can’t cook on an empty pantry. Ingredients are gathered from your garden, fishing, foraging, or by visiting local merchants. If you’re short on coin, you can always sell things you’ve foraged to earn money for the ingredients you need to buy.

Here’s where to get your supplies:

• Seeds: Visit Farmer Cotton in the village square to buy seeds for your garden.
• Meats & Dairy:Tom Cotton runs his family’s stall and will sell you essentials like cheese, various meats, and milk.
• Seasoning: For that extra touch of flavor, find Hobson Hornblower. He sells key seasonings like Salt, Cinnamon, and Lemons.
• Baking Goods: Head to the Mill just outside the village square to find Sandyman. He’ll sort you out with baking ingredients like yeast, barley, and flour.

The Art of Hobbit Cooking: Your First Meal

When you first start, your kitchen will have a few basic tools: a Chopping Board, a Mixing Bowl, and a Frying Pan. As you progress, you’ll unlock more advanced tools, which we’ll cover in our future Ultimate Full Cooking Guide.

The goal of cooking is to hit the star on your Texture Graph. This graph tracks your dish’s texture from Chunky to Smooth and from Crispy to Tender.

Here’s how to control it:

• Chopping (Chunky vs. Smooth): Use the Chopping Board to make an ingredient smoother. Chopping it more finely will push the dish towards the “Smooth” side of the graph. If you only chop to the middle of the chopping bar, you’ll keep its current texture.
• Frying (Crispy vs. Tender): Use the Frying Pan to make an ingredient more tender. Be careful not to go too far with just one ingredient! If you do, you’ll overshoot the star when you add and fry the next one. A little at a time is the key.

Understanding Flavors and Combos

Satisfying a guest’s craving comes down to flavor. Each ingredient has a default flavor, which is helpfully color-coded:

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

A dish’s default flavor is determined by which flavor type is most common among its ingredients. You can use seasonings to change an ingredient’s flavor during the cooking process. For example, adding Rosemary to a Salty piece of pork in the frying pan will make it Bitter instead.

You can also create special Flavor Combos to improve your meal’s quality. Combining specific pairs of flavors makes a dish FLAVORFUL, which gives you a bonus. While not always possible, you should aim for these combos when you can.

The confirmed FLAVORFUL combos are:

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

Meals, Mail, and Making Friends

The main reason for cooking in Tales of the Shire is to share meals with your fellow Hobbits. When you host a Shared Meal, your guests will have specific cravings.

On the day of the Meal, your guests will send you an RSVP in the mail. This letter is important—it tells you which flavor profile they are craving. You can also see this in the “Cravings” tab of your cookbook.

After you serve them, you’ll see how much they liked the meal and if you satisfied their craving. The more they enjoy it, the more your reputation with them will grow. Increasing your relationship rank with villagers unlocks better rewards and new recipes!

Beginner Cooking in Tales of the Shire Showcase

If you want a visual guide to the cooking process, our video below breaks it all down. It shows you everything from gathering ingredients to mastering the Texture Graph and satisfying flavor cravings for your first successful Meal.

(Video is in the works!)

We hope you found this guide to cooking in Tales of the Shire useful. For more guides, check out our Tales of the Shire Section, and if you have questions, feel free to join our community discord to get help from fellow players.