Gratin
Food · FoodDishVegetable2★Potatoes baked under a layer of sauce, at their best straight from the oven. Keeps hunger down for a long stretch and adds 10% Defense temporarily.
Gratin is 8th of 20 cooked dishes by hunger restored, at 113 against the 738 of Special Cake.
It feeds no other recipe, which makes it a terminal item: craft what you will actually carry and stop there.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
Milk
Potato
Flour
Wheat×3Where to Find Gratin
Gratin is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using Gratin Well
The basic Cooking Pot cannot bake this. The earliest station that can is the Electric Kitchen, unlocked at Technology level 41 — and it only runs while a Power Generator is feeding it, so budget for the generator and its fuel before you plan a Gratin supply line.
Two later stations also handle the recipe and neither needs electricity: the Large-Scale Stone Oven at Technology level 49 and the Ancient Kitchen at level 70. If your base has no power grid yet, the Stone Oven is the simpler route.
The Potato Plantation comes at Technology level 29, a full twelve levels before any station that can cook this. Plant Potato early and let the surplus pile up in a chest — by the time you unlock the Electric Kitchen, only Milk and Flour will be gating your output.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Minestrone at 146 hunger restored; step down and it is Stew at 100. The size of that step is what decides whether the crafting bill is justified yet.
Other cooked dishs at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
