Cooking in Graveyard Keeper 2 is your primary way to restore energy without trekking home to sleep every few minutes. The kitchen holds two workstations, both start broken, and neither will show you a single recipe until you repair them. Once they're running, the Cooking tech tree opens up and most of the 56 verified recipes become available through research, with a handful locked behind vendor purchases and NPC quest rewards.
How do you unlock cooking recipes in Graveyard Keeper 2?
The short answer: repair the Broken Kitchen Table and Broken Oven, then research cooking technologies at the tech tree. Both stations sit on the left side of the room when you walk through your front door. Repairing them reveals the First snacks and First dishes technology entries, which get the whole system moving.
Repairing the Kitchen Table
The Broken Kitchen Table requires 6 Wooden Planks to repair. Planks are made one-for-one from Boards at the Woodworking Workbench I, and Boards come from Logs cut at the Sawhorse. Keep a wood reserve going early because the same supply feeds station upgrades and other construction.
Repairing the Kitchen Oven
The Broken Oven costs 2 Pieces of Stone. Make Pieces of Stone at the Stonemason's Workbench by combining Stone with Wood Wedges. Mine boulders with your pickaxe for Stone, and use a Chopping Spot to produce 10 Wood Wedges from one Short Log.
Graveyard Keeper 2 Guide: All Cooking Recipes
Setting up the Firewood Shed before you cook anything
Every Kitchen Oven recipe burns Fuel, and the Oven will refuse to start a single batch without it. Fuel does not come from Firewood directly; the Firewood Shed converts it. One Short Log produces 10 Firewood at the Chopping Spot, and the shed then converts 2 Firewood into 20 Fuel units.
The Firewood Shed I blueprint sits in the Metallurgy tech tree under Bronze Works. Building it inside the house costs 10 Boards and 10 Flitches. Build it as soon as the repairs are done or you will have unlocked recipes you cannot actually make.
What does the Cook perk do?
Some recipes carry a cooking mastery requirement that blocks the craft even when the station and ingredients are ready. The Cook perk, bought from the Inspirations menu, raises your mastery to clear that gate. It also adds extra portions to basic dishes, which matters when you are batch-cooking to hit the 100 total meals needed for the Master Chef achievement.
The higher-tier Cook II perk applies the same bonus to more advanced recipes. Unlock it before moving into the oven-heavy mid-game content.
Graveyard Keeper 2 Guide: All Cooking Recipes
All Kitchen Table recipes
The Kitchen Table handles cold preparation: dough, smoothies, fillets, quality upgrades, and fishing bait. Both Kitchen Table and Kitchen Table II can run every recipe listed here unless noted otherwise.
Flour for Dough is milled from Wheat at the Millstone. Wheat grows in your Garden, so a single farming loop keeps the entire bread chain self-sufficient. Spices and Umami for quality upgrades are purchased from vendors; check trading levels to find who stocks them.
All Kitchen Oven recipes
The Oven handles everything that needs heat. Fuel costs below are standard rates before Heat Saver applies. The Cook II perk bonus is shown in parentheses where it differs from the base output.
Which recipes come from vendors and quests?
The tech tree does not cover everything. A portion of recipes, particularly fish dishes, arrive through NPC questlines and vendor purchases. Herm, the village merchant, is the clearest early example: completing his fish-delivery objectives unlocks Baked Fish and related dishes. Advancing NPC storylines and discovering new ingredients fills in the entries the tech tree skips.
The rare-fish meals at the bottom of the Oven list (Kraken Steak, Fried Golden Carp, Heavenly Salmon, Elder's Meal) each require a specific legendary catch and a matching technology unlock. These are one-off high-tier dishes rather than repeatable batch options, so treat them as milestones rather than a regular food supply.
For a broader look at how the early game fits together, the Graveyard Keeper 2 beginner's guide covers escaping the district, claiming your base, and getting the village operational before the kitchen becomes relevant.
Graveyard Keeper 2 Guide: All Cooking Recipes
What to research first in tech tree?
Not all cooking technologies are equal in terms of early payoff. The table below shows which technologies to prioritize based on how quickly their recipes pay off in energy and ingredient availability.
For more guides covering every system in the game, the Graveyard Keeper 2 strategy guides collection has everything from combat basics to late-game progression. If you enjoy the management and crafting loop here, there is plenty more to explore across other adventure games with similar depth.