Animal Crossing: New Horizons Cooking and Recipe Guide

Animal Crossing has tons of activities for you to do, including cooking. The cooking feature was added in the game’s very last update and game with dozens of recipes to decorate your island with. Making food isn’t just as simple as using a DIY workbench though, you will need to get through quite a few mini-hurdles in order to get started cooking.

How to Unlock Cooking in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

To unlock cooking, you will need to head over to the Resident Services building and access Nook Stop. From there, choose to redeem your nook points; there will be a new item called DIY recipes+. By purchasing this app for 2,000 Nook Miles, you will unlock cooking in your game.

How to Cook in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

In order to cook, you are going to need to have a kitchen. You will need to have access to a stove to cook; these can be purchased from Timmy and Tommy if they have them in stock. If you want to avoid time-skipping but don’t have a stove, then we suggest interacting with one of the many Animal Crossing community pages to have a stove sent to your mailbox.

Once you have cooked a dish, you can use it to decorate your home, eat it to gain the normal food boost, send it to a friend, or gift it to your favorite villager.

How to Get Cooking Recipes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Getting recipes is going to take some time as collecting them is mostly left up to RNG. You will get a few starter recipes when you buy the recipe expansion, and Timmy and Tommy will sell a selection of basic recipes for 4,980 bells in their shop. To get the rest of the recipes, you will need to try finding them by doing the following actions:

• Visiting neighbors who are cooking
• Popping Balloons
• Fishing
• Picking up Bottles

Like with regular DIY recipes, you can gift them to friends. Trading recipes is going to be one of the best ways to fill up your recipe book quickly.

How to Get Cooking Recipe Ingredients in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Every recipe is going to have different ingredients that you need to make it. These are largely tied to the game’s new gardening system. The 2.0 update added in the option to grow the following plants on your island:

• Wheat
• Carrots
• Sugarcane
• Tomatoes
• Potatoes

These can be purchased for Leif. To ensure you have easy access to ingredients, head over to Harv’s Island to pay off his spot. Once this is done, you can interact and buy plants from Leif every day.

• Quick Tip: If you are lucky, you can find crops growing on the islands that Kapp’n take you to on boat tours.

How to Grow Crops in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

The way you grow these crops is similar to pumpkins. Choose a spot on your island for farming and plant your crops. It takes three days for each plant to grow, and if you pop into the game to water them all three days, then you will get to harvest three crops instead of just one. If you don’t have time to water them, then the plants won’t die; your harvest will just be smaller.

To make some recipes you will need to process items like sugarcane into sugar in the cooking menu first, as well!