The following guide will bring you from newbie chef to Master in mere hours, and it’s pretty easy to do. You’re going to have to do some Trading Post shopping if you haven’t collected many ingredients, but the guide keeps gathered material to a minimum.

There are simple ingredients that you can find from the Chef Vendor for karma and copper. These items are Water, Flour, Butter, Sugar, Egg, Chocolate Bar, Oil, Vinegar, Buttermilk, Bell Pepper, Black Peppercorn, Salt and Soy Sauce.

One thing to note: The karma vendor ingredients require you to complete hearts to access. The highest level heart required in this guide is level 69. Obviously, there are other alternatives if you have access to other ingredients.

Last week, we discussed at length about how cooking will be my tradeskill of choice in Guild Wars 2. Based on feedback that I received, I know there are plenty of you who are looking very seriously at also making this your crafting discipline as well. Here are five tips to help you master the cooking discipline.

1. A great place to start if you’re trying to get some recipes discovered is to think about realistic recipes, as was suggested in my previous article. Taking it a step further, remember that discovered recipes have a maximum of 4 ingredients, so breaking real recipes into 4 basic ingredients is important. We can assume that most real life recipes start with a base such as a meat or a starch, they then have some sort of sauce or water added, and then have a vegetable, and either seasonings or another vegetable added.

I want to start with a bit of a confession.  I’m a cooking junkie.  Cooking is always my tradeskill of choice in any game that it is available.  I’m a fan of cooking because I love the idea of creating consumables as a tradeskill, as there is always a built in demand due to their limited use.  Other tradeskills must compete with world drops, but Cooks have only a very small amount of competition in this regard.  Further exacerbating the competition factor in Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the Trading Post operates across all servers, and while all crafting disciplines will undoubtedly experience increased competition as a result of this, the built in continuous demand for consumables should help to keep the chefs of Tyria profitable.