Cooking on MoP Classic runs from 1 to 600 in five stops, one per expansion, and the whole route is roughly 630 crafts of ordinary meat, fish, and produce, about 750 once the RNG buffer is added. This guide gives you the bracket route, the craft count expected at each step, and one shopping list you can fill in a single Auction House trip before you start.

Every number here is computed from the MoP Classic client data, not estimated. Where the route depends on a mechanic our data cannot check, that section is cut rather than guessed at, and it is called out below.

What you need

Cooking has no reagent equivalent to Alchemy's vials. Every recipe below turns a single stack of a common meat, fish, or vegetable into a finished dish, and almost everything on the shopping list is a normal Auction House commodity.

Ordinary crafting on the base Cooking skill line carries you all the way to skill 530 with no trainer detour. Past 530, the profession splits into six parallel specializations, Way of the Brew, Way of the Grill, Way of the Oven, Way of the Pot, Way of the Steamer, and Way of the Wok, each taught by its own trainer in Halfhill. Your displayed Cooking skill equals whichever Way you have trained highest, and all six run the identical numeric structure, so pick whichever theme you like. This guide walks Way of the Wok as the worked example; swap in any other Way's equivalent recipe and the craft counts below still apply.

How the craft counts work

A recipe gives a guaranteed skill point while your skill sits below its yellow threshold, a shrinking chance while it sits between yellow and gray, and nothing once it reaches gray. The "expected crafts" column below is that math applied to each recipe's real yellow and gray values in the client data. The "buy" column adds 20 percent on top, because expectation is an average and your run will not be exactly average. Two recipes in the Pandaria stretch have their yellow and gray thresholds set to the same number, which just means the skill-up is a flat guaranteed-or-nothing coin flip with no fractional decay in between, so those two brackets carry zero RNG.

The route

Classic, 1 to 300

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
1-45	Charred Wolf Meat	44	53	Stringy Wolf Meat x53
45-80	Smoked Bear Meat	35	42	Bear Meat x42
80-115	Crab Cake	35	42	Crawler Meat x42
115-125	Cooked Crab Claw	10	12	Crawler Claw x12
125-135	Redridge Goulash	10	12	Tough Condor Meat x12
135-160	Crocolisk Gumbo	25	30	Tender Crocolisk Meat x30
160-170	Curiously Tasty Omelet	10	12	Raptor Egg x12
170-215	Soothing Turtle Bisque	45	54	Turtle Meat x54
215-250	Spiced Chili Crab	35	42	Tender Crab Meat x42
250-265	Grilled Squid	15	18	Winter Squid x18
265-275	Poached Sunscale Salmon	10	12	Raw Sunscale Salmon x12
275-300	Mightfish Steak	25	30	Large Raw Mightfish x30

Outland, 300 to 375

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
300-310	Smoked Desert Dumplings	10	12	Sandworm Meat x12
310-320	Buzzard Bites	10	12	Buzzard Meat x12
320-335	Blackened Basilisk	15	18	Chunk o' Basilisk x18
335-345	Roasted Clefthoof	10	12	Clefthoof Meat x12
345-370	Spicy Crawdad	25	30	Furious Crawdad x30
370-375	Fisherman's Feast	5	6	Huge Spotted Feltail x6

Northrend, 375 to 450

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
375-400	Black Jelly	25	30	Borean Man O' War x90
400-450	Mega Mammoth Meal	59	71	Chunk o' Mammoth x142, Northern Spices x71

Mega Mammoth Meal is the only recipe covering the last 50 points of Northrend Cooking, and its own yellow threshold sits at 425, so the second half of that bracket is real yellow-zone RNG rather than a guaranteed climb, which is why 50 nominal points cost 59 expected crafts. Northern Spices is a cheap item sold directly by Northrend cooking trainers, not something you need to farm.

Cataclysm, 450 to 525

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
450-455	Highland Spirits	5	6	Highland Pomegranate x6, Refreshing Spring Water x6
455-465	Broiled Mountain Trout	10	12	Mountain Trout x12
465-490	Hearty Seafood Soup	25	30	Blood Shrimp x30
490-525	Baked Rockfish	54	66	Algaefin Rockfish x66

Baked Rockfish's own yellow threshold is 515, so the last 10 nominal points of this stop run deep into its yellow zone before the recipe grays out at 525. That is why 35 nominal points cost 54 expected crafts, the most RNG-heavy stretch in this guide outside the Way system's own tail.

Pandaria, 525 to 600

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
525-530	Viseclaw Soup	5	6	Viseclaw Meat x6
530-550	Sauteed Carrots (Way of the Wok)	20	24	Juicycrunch Carrot x48
550-575	Valley Stir Fry (Way of the Wok)	25	30	Reef Octopus x30, Wildfowl Breast x30
575-600	Sea Mist Rice Noodles (Way of the Wok)	25	30	Rice Flour x30, Tiger Gourami x150, Raw Turtle Meat x150, Scallions x750

Sea Mist Rice Noodles makes 10 dishes per craft, which is why its reagent totals look large next to the craft count. You are still only performing 25 to 30 individual craft actions for this bracket; you just walk away with a stack of finished food afterward.

Total shopping list

Buy this once and you can run the whole route without stopping. Quantities include the 20 percent buffer.

Material	Total	Buy (+20%)
Scallions	625	750
Tiger Gourami	125	150
Raw Turtle Meat	125	150
Chunk o' Mammoth	118	142
Borean Man O' War	75	90
Northern Spices	59	71
Algaefin Rockfish	54	66
Turtle Meat	45	54
Stringy Wolf Meat	44	53
Juicycrunch Carrot	40	48
Bear Meat	35	42
Crawler Meat	35	42
Tender Crab Meat	35	42
Tender Crocolisk Meat	25	30
Large Raw Mightfish	25	30
Furious Crawdad	25	30
Blood Shrimp	25	30
Reef Octopus	25	30
Wildfowl Breast	25	30
Rice Flour	25	30
Winter Squid	15	18
Chunk o' Basilisk	15	18
Crawler Claw	10	12
Tough Condor Meat	10	12
Raptor Egg	10	12
Raw Sunscale Salmon	10	12
Sandworm Meat	10	12
Buzzard Meat	10	12
Clefthoof Meat	10	12
Mountain Trout	10	12
Huge Spotted Feltail	5	6
Highland Pomegranate	5	6
Refreshing Spring Water	5	6
Viseclaw Meat	5	6

Scallions dominate the list because Sea Mist Rice Noodles makes 10 dishes per craft and needs 25 Scallions per craft to match. If you are only chasing skill 600 and do not need the extra food, you still need to buy for the full craft count, the noodles just come out as a bonus.

Where this route disagrees with the usual advice

Several places, all because the usual route relies on a mechanic our client data cannot verify.

The commonly published route levels 1 to roughly 520 through Sungshin Ironpaw vendor recipes, bought with tokens earned from daily quests and turned in for a guaranteed skill point per use. That is not a craft-and-roll system, it has no yellow or gray threshold in the client data, and no recipe name in it resolves to a spell in our client dump. We cannot verify a single number from that route, so we cut it entirely and built this guide from the ordinary trainer-taught recipe chain instead, verified window by window. It is slower to execute than Ironpaw dailies, but every craft count above is checked against the game data rather than estimated.

The commonly published route also bridges skill 520 to 525 with two quest turn-ins rather than crafting. Quests are not part of this guide's model either, so if you are following the crafting route below instead of Ironpaw, you will not hit that gap at all, ordinary crafting carries straight through 520 and on to 530.

For the 576 to 600 stretch, the commonly published route uses the "Banquet of the X" recipe for each Way, whose only reagent difference from the recipe before it is 100 Year Soy Sauce, a limited vendor item our data cannot price or confirm supply for. We use the Way's other 600-threshold recipe instead (Sea Mist Rice Noodles for Way of the Wok), which needs no such item and produces an identical guaranteed climb over the same 25 points.

Our data also lists four recipes on the base Cooking skill line itself, not any Way, with a yellow and gray threshold both set at 600 and a listed minimum skill of 1: Pandaren Banquet, Great Pandaren Banquet, Spicy Vegetable Chips, and Mango Ice. Taken at face value, those would let you skip the entire Way system. That contradicts everything else known about how Cooking works past 530 in this expansion, so we treat these the same way this guide treats Alchemy's transmutes elsewhere: the client data is missing a real acquisition gate, most likely an achievement or reward unlock, and we cut them rather than publish a route that cannot actually be walked this way.

FAQ

Does this work on any MoP Classic realm? Yes. The route is computed from the Mists of Pandaria progression client, so it applies to Mists of Pandaria progression realms.

Do I have to pick Way of the Wok? No. All six Ways, Brew, Grill, Oven, Pot, Steamer, and Wok, share the identical yellow and gray thresholds at 550, 575, and 600. Pick whichever one matches the food you actually want, then use the same expected and buy numbers from the Pandaria table above with that Way's equivalent recipe.

Can I skip ahead if my Cooking is already partly leveled? Yes. Find your current skill in the bracket tables and start there, buying only the materials from that row down. The totals are additive.

Why do I keep failing to gain skill even though the recipe is not gray? Between yellow and gray, skill-ups are a chance, not a guarantee, and the chance shrinks the closer you get to gray. The Mega Mammoth Meal and Baked Rockfish brackets above carry the most of this RNG in the whole route; expect real variance there even with the 20 percent buffer.

What do I do with everything I craft? Most of it is edible food with a stat buff, so keep a stack for leveling or dungeon runs rather than vendoring it. Sea Mist Rice Noodles in particular hands you 10 dishes per craft, far more than you need just to hit 600.

When this guide changes

This route is computed from MoP Classic client build 5.5.4.68806. If Blizzard adjusts recipe thresholds or changes how the Way system is gated in a content patch, the brackets shift and this page is recomputed from the new client data. The material quantities are expectations from the current thresholds, so they move with them.