7 Strangest Food Items In Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley lets you do many things, from farming to fishing to foraging. And once you’ve gotten your first house upgrade, you’ll unlock the kitchen, which allows you to cook numerous meals to help you in your gameplay by restoring your energy or providing a buff. Once you’ve learned a recipe, either by learning it when leveling up a skill, receiving the recipe in the mail, or learning it from the Queen of Sauce show, if you have the ingredients on you, you can cook it in your kitchen .
With 80 recipes total in the game, some of them are bound to not be so normal, whether it be because they’re barely edible concoctions, or because the ingredients aren’t quite what you’d expect for the kind of food you ‘ re preparing.
7 Strange Good
Of course, the strange bun is a strange food item – it’s right there in the name after all. But what makes this bun so strange? To start, it’s made out of wheat flour, void mayonnaise, and a periwinkle, and the game only considers one of those ingredients to be properly edible on its own. Void mayonnaise is actually poisonous to the player, and the description of it states that it “smells like burnt hair”, and periwinkles, which are actually edible snails in real life, simply can’t be eaten on their own in the game.
However, what’s surprising is that every single character who can be given a strange bun hates it. This includes Krobus, who loves void mayonnaise on his own, and Shane, who sends you the recipe in the mail and tells you to give him a sample if you make it. To top it all off, the strange bun isn’t used in any quests, however, it can be used to create a unique shirt in the sewing machine, and to unlock a secret item in the game.
6 Pale Broth
Pale Broth only has one ingredient: white algae. Yes, the same white algae that the game describes as “super slimy” and that you can only find by fishing in the mines, sewer, mutant bug lair, or witch’s swamp, none of which are exactly great places to find food ingredients – the sewer at least of all as any ingredients sourced from there likely come with more than a few health concerns.
Regardless of where you find the white algae to make this recipe, pale broth is described as “A delicate broth with a hint of sulfur.” In case you’re lucky enough to have never smelled sulfur before, the closest thing to compare it to is a rotten egg. Despite the likely unsanitary ingredient and the sulfuric scent, almost everyone in Pelican Town likes receiving Pale Broth as a gift.
5 Fiddlehead Risotto
At first glance, this dish seems perfectly normal. Risotto is a popular rice dish, fiddlehead ferns are edible and taste delicious, and the three ingredients in this recipe, which are oil, fiddlehead fern, and garlic, are all normal cooking ingredients that you’d expect to find in a dish like this . So what’s so strange about the fiddlehead risotto?
Well, let’s go over the ingredients again. Oil, fiddlehead fern, and garlic. That’s right, this rice dish has no rice in the ingredients. It’d be like making a nacho recipe and leaving out the tortilla chips in the ingredient list. Perhaps only Old Master Cannoli knows where the rice in this recipe comes from.
4 Lucky Lunch
The lucky lunch is a popular food item in the late game, due to its strong luck boost which helps a lot when mining in the Skull Cavern. However, this recipe is kind of odd when it comes to its ingredients. Sure, a tortilla is perfectly normal on its own, but sea cucumbers and blue jazz?
While sea cucumbers on their own are poisonous in the game, in real life they’re actually edible. And blue jazz may be a flower, but when eaten they give the farmer a small health and energy boost. These round blue flowers are likely based on allium, which is edible in real life too, and are the genus that includes garlic, onions, and leeks. This recipe is a strange one, but is actually one of the more edible items on this list.
3 Sashimi
Sashimi on its own is a perfectly normal dish, and the recipe in Stardew Valley is one of the easiest of all recipes to make, since you can use literally any fish in the game to make it. Lower quality sunfish, carp, and herring always turn a profit when turned into sashimi, but if for some reason you want to slice up a legendary fish, the game won’t stop you.
The game also won’t stop you from turning the very poisonous pufferfish into sashimi. That’s right, in Stardew Valley you can make the dish known as fugu sashimi in Japan. The same dish that takes three years of training in order to be licensed to prepare in restaurants, because making a mistake when preparing it can be fatal. Apparently, the farmer has also undergone this rigorous training, since making sashimi will turn the pufferfish from a poisonous consumable to one that restores your health and energy.
2 Seafoam Pudding
Seafoam pudding provides the best fishing buff in the game, but it also requires some rare ingredients to make up for this. It’s made using flounder, midnight carp, and squid ink, with squid ink being a pretty difficult ingredient to find, since you have to either get it through fish ponds or as a loot drop in the mines. Midnight carp is probably the most difficult ingredient to procure, as you can only get it during the Winter Market, which only lasts for three days each in-game year.
A pudding made out of fish definitely isn’t a common food to come across in real life, though there is a similar recipe from Norway called fiskepudding which is usually made from haddock as opposed to flounder, carp, or squid ink. Still, this fishy treat seems to be an acquired taste, as almost everyone in Stardew Valley hates it, with the exception being Willy and Krobus, who both like receiving seafoam pudding as a gift.
1 Miner’s Treat
The miner’s treat is made from cave carrots, sugar, and milk, so the description of this food item, which reads “This should keep your energy up,” is right. A sugary treat can definitely help keep your energy up, and though a carrot is a strange choice, considering how common cave carrots are, it’s no surprise that someone came up with a recipe to turn it into a sugary snack for miners to eat. But how did a carrot turn into a rainbow lollipop?
Regardless, this recipe is helpful for early game mining ventures, since it’s unlocked at mining level three and gives a boost to mining and magnetism, on top of the health and energy boost.
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