Minestrone
Food · FoodDishVegetable2★A soup simmered with an assortment of vegetables that heats you from the inside out. Raises work speed for a time.
Minestrone is 7th of 20 cooked dishes by hunger restored, at 146 against the 738 of Special Cake.
No recipe takes it as an ingredient. Whatever you build is the finished article, so there is no reason to hoard spares.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
Minestrone Crafting Recipe
Tomato×3
Carrot×2
Onion×2
Potato×1Crafting it takes 8 materials across 4 types.
Where to Find Minestrone
Minestrone is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
The Cooking Pot cannot make this one. Minestrone is an Electric Kitchen recipe, which puts the real cost of the bowl at Technology level 41 and a build bill of 30 Refined Ingot, 20 Charcoal, 5 Circuit Board and 5 Flame Organ — plus a generator and a wired base, since the kitchen is powered. The Large-Scale Stone Oven at level 49 and the Ancient Kitchen at level 70 cook it as well, so once either of those is standing the Electric Kitchen is optional. Budget the cook time too: the recipe is 32,000 work against the Salad's 4,000, an eight-fold job, so it wants a level-3 Kindling Pal parked at the station rather than you standing there holding the button.
Using Minestrone Well
"Raises work speed for a time" is +40% Work Speed for 600 seconds — ten minutes on the nose. Every work-speed dish in the game runs on that same ten-minute clock, so the only thing that separates them is the number, and the number puts Minestrone third: Dumud Chowder and Mozzarina Hamburger tie at +50%, then this at +40%, then a crowded +30% tier holding Salad, Pizza, Chicken Saute and Fried Chicken. That makes it the strongest bowl in the game you can cook from crops alone — the two dishes above it both need a Pal-sourced ingredient you cannot plant.
Eight crops per bowl across four different plants, and each plant is its own unlock: Tomato x3 from the Tomato Plantation at level 21, Potato x1 at 29, Carrot x2 at 32, Onion x2 at 36. Tomatoes at three per bowl are the pinch point — run that plot at double the others. All four plots need Planting, Watering and Gathering cover from the same Pal roster, so a base that already farms lettuce or wheat scales into this with a bigger crew rather than a new one. If your farm plots are not all online yet, cook Salad instead and take +30% for two crops; the ten missing per cent is not worth stalling a build session over.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Mushroom Quiche at 184 hunger restored; step down and it is Gratin at 113. Weigh the jump against what the next tier costs you before committing the resources.
Other cooked dishs at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
