10 need-to-know recipes for surviving in 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild'

Whether you have one apple or you have 50, apples (and other basic fruits you find all over Hyrule) are far more useful when cooked. Early on, you're going to find a ton of apples. And with just three hearts, it's tempting to eat them piecemeal, uncooked. They replenish half a heart apiece! When cooked, they double in usefulness. When cooked in bunches, they become even more restorative.

Better yet: You can cook apples without the cooking pot. If you find a lit fire, just dump your apples on top and pick up the "baked apples" it produces. You'll learn quickly that the cooking system in Hyrule is far more forgiving than real life.

Hyrule is a wildly diverse ecosystem. There are freezing mountain ridges and scorching hot deserts (that dip to freezing temperatures at night). There's an alluvial plain where lightning and rain never stops. It's quite a place!

One of the first missions you're tasked with in "Breath of the Wild," before the game's massive open-world is open to you, is reaching a shrine in an area that's simply too cold for Link to go. He starts freezing to death quickly, and it's only solved by constantly restoring lost health or, as luck would have it, by cooking a meal with hot peppers. You can simply simmer one directly in a cooking pot, or you can cook it with other ingredients.

The combination of volt fruit and raw meat turns out an "Electro Meat Skewer." Eating it gives you resistance to electricity for a limited time. If you're in a pinch, fighting electric enemies or in a dangerous area full of loose wires, this skewer is the one to turn to. It'll also repair some health, naturally.

To create the "chilly salt-grilled prime meat" dish, I cooked together rock salt, raw prime meat, and "cool safflina" — a flower found all over Hyrule. Not only does this give Link a bunch of health, but it enables "low-level heat resistance." If you're venturing into the Gerudo Desert or to Death Mountain, you'll need to have some of these handy.

In this instance, I cooked bananas with mushrooms. Sounds gross! Agreed. But it turned out a dish that gives Link four hearts and boosted his attack ability for a limited time. And you'll need that ability boosted as often as possible — you're just as likely to be killed by a common enemy as you are a boss enemy. Hyrule is a tough place to survive.

Perhaps you need to escape somewhere quickly? Or maybe you just want to skip over a long mountain climb more quickly? The Hasty Elixir above, created by combining a Keese wing (the bats) and a hot-footed frog, will help you out. Keese are found everywhere, especially at night — defeat one (or several) and pick up the wings they leave behind. Hot-footed frogs are harder to find, though you're likely to spot them in lakes and ponds across Hyrule.

The "enduring steamed meat" dish seen above was created using raw meat and stamella shrooms — a mushroom found all over Hyrule, particularly at the base of trees. By combining raw meat, a stamella shroom, and Hyrule Herb (found all over the place), I created this simple dish that massively increases health while also re-filling stamina.

Even better: It increases stamina beyond normal, granting a temporary boost to overall stamina. This is tremendously useful in a ton of different instances. Say you're climbing a mountain and nearly out of stamina, about to fall to your death — pause the game and snack on this dish! Solved!

The concept of eating something that makes you more stealthy is bizarre, no doubt, but it's a useful solution in Hyrule. Even after dozens of hours with "Breath of the Wild," I'm still encountering camps of enemies that devastate me. Easier than fighting them, why not sneak around?

By combining silent shrooms — found all over Hyrule, often at the base of trees — with meat, I created this skewer that repaired Link's health and temporarily made him harder than ever to detect. No more fight — I'm sneaking right past those jerks.

Durian is far from a standard fruit here in North America, but in Asia it's far more common. The fruit is prominently heralded in "Breath of the Wild" — it makes ridiculously useful meals that extend your maximum health far beyond normal.

In case you hadn't already noticed, the meal I made above — using five durian and nothing else — both fully recovers Link's health and grants him an extra 20 hearts. 20! If you can't defeat an enemy with that much health on your side, you need to rethink your combat strategy.

By combining monster parts and actual food ingredients, you're likely to create some disgusting things. These meals are known only as "dubious food." They tend to give one or two hearts at the most, but you can get more out of it by using heartier food — a hearty radish and a blue lizard produced the concoction seen above.

Yes, it's far from the most useful recipe here in terms of overall impact, but it never hurts to have a handful of these around just in case. More often than not, you'll need a few hearts and not a dozen. Most importantly, it was extremely rare that I found myself without ingredients for this dish. And that's crucial.