Chef

The Chef is the station's primary source of food that doesn't come directly from a vending machine. Your job is to ensure that people have options to keep themselves fed with, first and foremost.

The Kitchen and You!

When you first spawn into the Kitchen, you might notice some machinery not found on the average codebase, unless you're more experienced with codebases from which those machines were derived. Some of these machines are, at the time of writing, used very narrowly and not used in what might be considered "traditional" recipes. This guide, in conjunction with the Guide to Food and Drinks, will hopefully help the reader make important distinctions between which machines are useful for what purposes, and give you better insight on how to be a Chef that can make meals so good people feel ashamed that they ever bought vending machine food.

You also have access to Hydroponics, in the event that there are no Botanists present that shift, so you can grow your own ingredients. You should leave that work to the Botanist, if there is one present, but if not you're encouraged to take over in their stead and treat it like your private garden, barring any conflicting orders from heads of staff. This isn't the guide to look to for knowing how to grow, however, so look in another guide for that.

Taking Stock: Your Supply

The first thing a prepared Chef should do is take stock of their supply, and familiarize themselves with the most basic level of the Kitchen before they dive in to the deep end of batch-baking in the Oven, or turning default-toxic dishes safe-to-eat. First things first: familiarize yourself with the supplies on display. Don't overlook the lockers either, as they have some useful equipment within. The Chef's Closet in particular has a handful of clothing options at your display to fit your intended aesthetic, some spare headsets, and the useful equipment. Each Chef's Closet comes equipped with a bar of soap, a retail scanner for the Chef who wants to charge for their work, a tip jar for the less greedy Chef, a box or two of mousetraps for the particularly annoying cheese-munchers, package wrapping and a destination tagger for mailing your food through the disposals-mail system, and the almighty Food Bag.

Your Equipment: Machinery - Main Kitchen

Here is the primary area where you'll be doing your cooking. There's a spread of machines on display - and we'll cover what each of them do in the section below! Besides that, you've got some supply tables, and free tables to do your work on. Read on and get cooking, culinary aspirants!

The Microwave

The Microwave is the most traditional piece of equipment, and needs the least amount of explaining. You load the microwave up with the correct amount of ingredients to finish a recipe, and then hit the power button to cook it. One area that this may be of importance to note in: if you come from codebases wherein cooking is performed via a crafting button, that is not how cooking is performed here. Instead, you take each ingredient, and load it into the microwave, then click on the microwave, then hit the "Turn on!" button to begin cooking. If you make a mistake, you may hit "Eject ingredients!", but keep in mind all liquid ingredients, i.e. Milk or any substance which is recorded in units, will be lost. One final thing to consider that might be different from codebases you're more familiar with is that you can cook multiple batches of food at once, provided you have the ingredients correct. We'll cover that more in "Cooking Techniques".

The Oven

The Oven is the next most significant piece of cooking machinery that people are unfamiliar with in it's usage. To begin, you need to heat the oven up before you can actually cook in it. To do this, ALT+CLICK the oven to close the lid, then right click it, and hit "Toggle Power" to begin heating the Oven. This is one of the FIRST things that should be done in a Kitchen, if you even THINK you will be cooking with an Oven (which you most likely will!), due to the amount of heat needed to begin cooking. While that's heating up, right-click the oven once again and take a look at what other options you have available: "Open/Close Oven Door" is a slower version of alt-clicking the oven, as you most likely guessed. You can do it if it's more comfortable to you than ALT+CLICK-ing the Oven, but be warned: The Oven will lose heat when the door to it is opened, and will do so rapidly. Keep the Oven on, and keep the door closed to gain and retain heat. The other significant option in this menu is "Choose Output". From here you can specify what the Oven should make. Generally speaking, you want to keep this on "Default", because some of these options will result in custom food rather than a traditional recipe if it is not set to "Default" output. We will cover what is meant by "custom food" in "Cooking Techniques".

Now that the mechanics of the Oven itself are out of the way, the next most significant part: the baking sheet. Open the Oven door and left-click on it, and you should be greeted with five baking shelves (with the count starting at Zero rather than One). Each shelf contains an empty baking tray, which you can take out to fill with ingredients to cook in your Oven once it reaches cooking temperature. There is no special requirement needed to handle baking sheets that have been warming up in a 200 Degree Celsius Oven; chalk it up to futuretech, lazy coding, or QoL features - what's important to know is that you don't need to wear any special clothing items on the hands to handle them. The Baking Sheet will be what you use to store all of your ingredients of a given batch in one place. If you make a mistake while cooking, you can eject the solid ingredients/objects inserted onto the pan by right clicking it and pressing "Empty Container". If you make a mistake involving measurements of liquid ingredients, you can scrap the project if the mistake was too great to recover from by dumping the contents into the sink. To do this, you grab the baking sheet, and click and drag it's sprite onto the sink while holding it. Alternatively, you can grab another container to drop the contents into, and a dropper to extract the contents of the "tainted" baking sheet, 5u at a time.

Once you finish adding your ingredients according to the recipe of the dish you're preparing to the baking sheet, load it back into the Oven, and be certain that the door is closed. After that, you wait! Once your food is done, it will make a pinging noise, and notify anyone in range that the dish you're preparing is done! If you make a mistake, you will accidentally affix the adjective "baked" to the ingredients that were put in, and you will not have created your dish of choice. The liquid ingredients are not wasted nor consumed even on a failed attempt, however. Check your measurements carefully before you cook! If you are successful, clicking on the baking sheet will either retrieve the sheet itself, or the baked item if you did not batch-bake. If the former is the case, simply empty the container onto a table (food shouldn't be left on the ground, after all!) and voila, you've just taken your first steps to culinary mastery.

The Deep-Fryer

The Deep-Fryer is the third most important piece of machinery in the main Kitchen, as it is used to create deep-fryer specific recipes. It functions much like the Oven, with it's version of baking sheets being "Fryer Baskets". Each fryer basket can hold more than one item in them, so batch-baking is possible. Like the Oven, it also needs time to warm up before use, so consider hitting the power on at the start of the shift alongside the rest of your equipment. Of notable difference compared to the Oven, the Deep-Fryer runs off of Corn Oil. Depending on the situation, you may have a vat of cooking oil in or around the Kitchen and/or Freezer, or Kitchen Maintenance - or you might not. If not, you'll have to find another way to obtain Corn Oil to keep your deep-fryer running. Cooking Oil is not consumed except when items are currently frying in the deep fryer. Anything considered "edible" can be deep-fried, in addition to the standard array of recipes to produce actual food from the deep-fryer.

The All-In-One Grinder

The All-In-One Grinder is every much a useful piece of machinery to you as it is to the Chemist. You can insert ingredients into the grinder to break them down to their base reagent components, which is useful in creating specific ingredients from them, or engaging in more advanced cooking techniques with them. To use it, simply insert the item you wish to grind into liquid, select "grind", and then eject the beaker containing the resulting reagents.

The SmartFridge

The SmartFridge is a storage unit for housing ingredients grown in Hydroponics for use in recipes. They accept mass-input by dumping a filled plant bag into them, or can be loaded one-by-one by hand. If an ingredient is deemed unsuitable for the SmartFridge, it will refuse to accept your attempted input. Be warned that anyone, not just the Chef, can access and vend ingredients stored in the SmartFridge.

The Hot Foods Display

The SmartFridge of finished products (it even has the same sprite, as of the time of writing!), the Hot Foods Display will hold completed dishes in it's display to be vended at the user's leisure. It can also hold ingredients, as well, although that isn't the intended purpose of the machine. The same caveat of a lack of role-restricted access applies to the Hot Foods Display, although this is a much more useful application in creating a self-serving Kitchen, if you'd like to close the shutters and clock out once you've finished your day's work.

The Sink

Ally of those with a fixation on sanitation, the Sink is a useful source of water (don't forget to wash your hands before cooking!), but primarily is useful in being a dumping ground for liquid waste if you make a really big mistake in your cooking projects, or are simply too lazy to take a dropper to the baking sheet.

The Grill

The Grill is where we begin our decline in usefulness to the average Chef. Grills work similarly to Ovens, except that grills do not require as much heat to cook, and do not need to maintain a closed lid to gain and/or retain heat. The issue with the utility of the grill lies in that, as of writing, the Grill does not have any practical purpose. It can be used to affix the adjective "grilled" to an item, and will tint the sprite of a food item grilled completely orange - yes, this also means the plate that a grilled steak is on will turn orange. To the best of this author's knowledge and testing, there is no mechanical benefit given to grilling your food over cooking it a standard way. Just as you have baking sheets for Ovens, you have grilling racks for grills. There are three of them, and (again at the time of writing) they are all missing sprites. This is perhaps fitting given the currently nigh-useless nature of this piece of machinery. But hey, it does provide fluff value. So there is that.

The Candy-Machine

The Candy-Machine is used for producing custom foods from edible items. You select an option from a variety of outputs, toggle power, etc. There are no recipes which make use of this machine that are not used in custom food.

The Cereal-Maker

The Cereal-Maker is another machine used to make custom foods, and possibly the least useful. The machine will accept a great deal of food as inputs, and produce either a custom food item once processed, or affix the adjective "cerealized" to an item and then spit it back out.

Your Equipment: Machinery - Freezer

The coldbox in all it's chilly glory. Here your refrigerators, meat fridges, and possibly lockers containing general supplies will be located, alongside even more important pieces of machinery! Most important of all is your pet - yes, you do have a pet! Skipper the Penguin makes his home in the icebox, so give him a pat on the head, and possibly a treat or two throughout the shift. He's your responsibility, after all.

The CondiMaster 3000

The CondiMaster does much of what the ChemMaster does for the Chemist, but serves the Chef's needs instead! Insert an object that contains reagents - usually but not exclusively beakers - and from there more finely manipulate the reagents contained therein! You can get rid of unwanted reagents by setting the transfer option to "Disposals", and then ejecting the beaker. Everything contained within the machine's buffer will then be disposed of. You can create miscellaneous ingredient bottles through this machine as well, and create pills via the bouillon cube option.

The Gibber

The Gibber is a piece of machinery that can be fed animals to produce meat from. Fish, monkeys, and more can be stuffed in. Once turned on, the Gibber will do it's work, and after a few moments, your meat will fly out at rapid speeds against the wall the Gibber is facing. Try not to get hit! To use it, grab-intent a mob you're intending to gib, reinforce your grip to put them into an aggressive grab, click on the gibber to insert, then simply click to start the meat-shower! If you accidentally put in a mob that was more friend than food, fear not! You can right click and select "Empty Gibber" to safely retrieve your would-be supply of meat from the Gibber.

The Icecream Vat

The Icecream Vat is a portable trolley that can be used to dispense ice-cream and ice-cream cones. To serve ice-cream to your patrons, you must first dispense a cone from the vat, and then select which flavor you'd like to give out. "Select" the flavor, as "Making" it is used to replenish your stock when you run low, and then click on it with the cone in hand. You've just served your first cone! In order to replenish your reserves in the event of a sunny getaway, or crew with particularly ravenous sweet tooths, the vat conveniently lists the ingredients needed to make more. Simply add the corresponding ingredients to the vat's reagent store, and select "Make" to produce more of a given item.

The Meat Spike

Meat Spikes are, in essence, an alternative to the Gibber where mobs of a sufficiently small size can be placed upon the meat spikes, and then harvested for meat. To place your unfortunate monkey victim on the spikes, grab him, and then click on the spike. The unlucky animal in your way will not need to be dead nor injured before impalement; they will be killed instantly upon being spiked if they are not already dead. Unlike certain other codebases, humans and species akin to that cannot be placed on the spikes. You'll have to find another way to get your "long pig". To gather meat from your animal, click on the carcass to harvest it's flesh until there is nothing left to harvest.

Your Equipment: Tools & Utensils

Knives & Cleavers

Knives and Cleavers are used to slice dishes and ingredients that are sliceable. Cleavers do more damage, and more useful in combat situations, but are functionally identical besides that to Knives.

Rolling Pin

The Rolling Pin is used to flatten dough.

Beakers & Droppers

Droppers remove 5u of liquid reagent from a given container, and can be used to place them elsewhere. Beakers are fairly self-explanatory.

Forks & Spoons

Forks and Spoons are used to take pieces out of a meal to then eat, rather than consuming the dish bare-handed. When consumed with this method, they are consumed faster, but may or may not have fewer overall nutrition and protein available.

Food Bags

Food Bags are very robust pieces of equipment. They can be used to pick up every ingredient and dish on a given tile at once. This is very useful in transporting food from one location to another, and the contents can be dumped into the Hot Foods Display much like how plant bags can mass dump their contents into the SmartFridge.

Package Wrapper & Destination Tagger

Anyone who's worked in Cargo before will know how to use this, but given that you're not reading that guide and you're still reading this section, I'm assuming you haven't. Grab package wrapper, click on the item you wish to ship - you'll wrap it up. Package wrapper has a finite amount of uses, so bear that in mind. You can examine package wrapper to see how many uses it has left before it'll wear out, but it should be a sufficient amount, unless you're trying to mail every meal you make across the station. Well, unless you get trapped in a pandemic and you need to isolate to avoid being contaminated, anyways. Next, you'll click on the destination tagger, and will be given a list of locations for which you mail the wrapped food to. Select the location of choice, click the package, and then insert the package into the disposals bin. Although it might sound highly unsanitary to place food you intend others to eat into a disposals bin, your package wrapping will ensure the food stays clean and safe for consumption! You can change the location after it's been set the first time, as well. If there are no options available to select the map we are currently on may not support disposals mailing as a function - in which case, the destination tagger is completely worthless to you!

Retail Scanner

The Retail Scanner can be used if you'd like to charge for orders, or get orders to from the Head of Personnel or Captain to, for whatever reason. Click on the device to add a custom input, this is where you name what the charge will be listed as on the device's history. Customers can pay via chargecard on their ATM, or through their ID directly. The money paid goes to the Civilian Department account, however, and is not usable (by default) to personally enrich yourself. No cash accepted, so be sure to tell customers to bring their card!

Cooking Techniques

Basic

These cooking techniques are the first step towards turning you from a novice Chef to an apprentice, and it is suggested that you look over the basics if you'd like become a more robust Chef. The idea might sound laughable at first, but Chefs in the right hands can become a force to be reckoned with.

Batch Baking

More than just one of a recipe can be made at a time! Although this will not work with every recipe, as some conflict and you will end up producing something entirely different from what you first intended, in many instances you can double, triple, etc. the amount of ingredients in a recipe (provided the container can physically hold that much!) and cook it as usual, and get output of finished products matching your ingredients! This applies to Ovens, Microwaves, and Deep-Fryers, so go wild and get that extra edge over the less erudite cooks who didn't read this guide! Be warned though: in some instances, the time taken to produce your desired batch of ingredients can scale with the amount of dishes you're trying to prepare at once.

Custom Food Items

Through certain pieces of machinery or combinations of base ingredients, you can make custom food items, such as custom sandwiches, personal pizzas, cursed jelly-candies, and other things. Experiment! Turn yourself away from the path of the righteous Chef who produces eye-wateringly good meals to the Cooking Alchemist that experiments with deep-fried butter cakes to deal psychic damage to the observer of your cooking abomination, or make a sandwich that has a combination of ingredients filling enough to feed an entire continent (that someone will no doubt scarf down in mere seconds in front of you, making you die a little on the inside and be drawn to murderous rage).

Advanced

Now we'll cover some techniques for the very interested Chef that might not be immediately obvious to try, and are useful to know.

Reagent Neutralizing

Some dishes, when created, will have toxic reagents in them that make them unsafe for general consumption. This can be handled through two ways: countering the unsafe reagent with another chemical via syringe injection into the dish, or extracting it via the CondiMaster 3000. The latter case is more useful to the no-good filthy traitor Chef who has access to the CondiMaster, but in the event that one is not present or power is not available (and your threats to kill the Engineering team's families if they don't get power back up have fallen on deaf ears), the former method will suffice, even if it requires more precision in it's execution.

Reagent Manipulation

All dishes are containers that can be used to store reagents than were initially created at the time of mixing. They can be added and tweaked afterwards via insertion through syringe, removal through CondiMaster, and more. This can be used to add extra flavor to meals that wouldn't traditionally have them - such as spicy donuts, or watery ribs, and make meals more or less filling. The implications of this are left up to the reader's imagination, and the aspirant Chef is encouraged to think imaginatively on how they may apply this to their work.

Supply Sources

So you've followed this guide and have managed to successfully cook enough food to run low on supplies, and still have the desire to cook more. What now? That would depend on the supply missing, but the most obvious option is to ask Cargo, as it's their job to order supplies. But let's say that there is nobody in Cargo; what to do then?

Animal Husbandry

Milk and Eggs can be replenished through the care of cows and chickens. You can milk cows using a bucket, and feeding chickens will eventually lead to them laying eggs for you to then use. Animals can be butchered for their respective meat types, as well. Obtaining the animals needed may be the difficult task, but if Cargo is closed, you could always ask Exploration to keep an eye out while they're exploring other planets, or see if Xenobiology has anything for you.

Farming

Not every crop grown has a one-sided use in recipes! Grinding many crops can give you useful ingredients to be used to replenish low supplies: Flour from Wheat, Sugar from Sugarcane, Cocoa Powder from Cocoa Pods, etc. Embrace your inner agriculturalist and go organic!

To Serve Man

The Head Admin whom the author of this guide consulted when writing it wanted it to be known that alternative sources of meat coming not from more simple animals but rather from more "exotic" sources are, in fact, allowed. As such, gun pointed at my temple as I write this, let it be known that players who opt-IN to their body being recycled for use as a food source are fair game to be turned into extra meat, so long as you have ensured that the owner of the body is being resleeved and are sure they consent you will not be banned for doing so. In addition, if you can convince Medical to allow you to print spare sleeves to be butchered, you also have another avenue to tap for more meat. Once again, ensure that if you use a sleeve based on another player they have consented to this usage. Although this disclaimer may be considered your "pass" for freedom from action against the administration team, this is only an OOC guarantee. Cannibal Chefs or people eyeing their fellow co-workers' bodies as food source are also fair game for Security and others to discriminate against. In short, you should probably expect IC persecution if you go down this route, but you should not expect OOC persecution.