Cooking with specific ingredients

[Tuesday]

How do you control what ingredient gets used when you cook?  For example, how do you make a cobbler with grapes for your pregnant sim, or use a particular type of fish in your sushi?

[Seabody]

I think I read somewhere that the ingredient that is used is the most suitable one found in the fridge. It is ordered left to right, top to bottom. If nothing suitable is found, it checks your Sim's inventory. For instance, if you have a Lettuce, Onion and Grape in your fridge, and a Red Herring, Grape, and Potato in your Inventory, and try to make Pancakes, it will use the fridge's Grape. If you try to make Sushi, it will use your Red Herring.

Hope this helps.

[Wai]

Place all conflicting food items in a storage chest before preparing your dish.  So, if you need to make fish and chips with a minnow, place every other fish you have, either in fridge or inventory, safely out of harms way in the chest.  Your sim will then have only the minnow available.

[m.sato]

Place all conflicting food items in a storage chest before preparing your dish.  So, if you need to make fish and chips with a minnow, place every other fish you have, either in fridge or inventory, safely out of harms way in the chest.  Your sim will then have only the minnow available.

Although that way works, there's no need for that much trouble.

The game chooses the ingredients in the following order:

1. What's in the cook's personal inventory, rather than inside the fridge;
2. the best quality item that fits the recipe;
3. The first item in the inventory (up and left).

To cook grape cobbler, for example, you must first buy or harvest the grapes, put it in the personal inventory of the cooking sim, putaway of it all fruit of better quality and then, finally, cook.

It seems more complex written than in practice.

[Pam]

All of that sounds great, but I know there have been plenty of times when my Sim made a recipe and used a random ingredient.  For example, I would have grapes both in the refrigerator and in the personal inventory, but it would use life fruit.  I have advanced gardeners almost all the time and they always have lots of produce around.  I think the best idea is where you put everything else in a chest and only have the one ingredient available at all.