Cooked food is the most reliable way to refill energy in Graveyard Keeper 2 without walking home to sleep, and every dish is prepared at the Kitchen Table or Kitchen Oven inside your house. None of the recipes exist until you rebuild those two stations, and most of them stay locked behind entries in the Cooking tech tree.
Quick answer: Repair the Broken Kitchen Table and Broken Oven to open the Cooking tech tree, then unlock each dish through its cooking technology. The rarest meals come from vendors and NPC quest rewards.
Repair the oven and kitchen table first
Both stations sit on the left side of the room as you walk through your front door, and both start broken. Repairing them reveals the first cooking technologies and gives you a place to prepare and cook food. The Kitchen Table handles cold dishes and prepping meat or fish, while the Oven cooks anything that needs heat.
Finishing the repairs adds the First snacks and First dishes technologies to the Cooking tab of your tech tree. From there you can mill Flour, prepare Dough, and start building toward the rest of the recipe list.
Fuel the oven with a Firewood Shed
Every Oven recipe consumes Fuel, and the Oven cannot cook a single dish without it. Fuel comes from the Firewood Shed, so build one soon after the repairs or you will unlock recipes you cannot actually make.
The Firewood shed I blueprint sits in the Metallurgy tech tree under Bronze Works, and building it inside the house costs 10 Boards and 10 Flitches. Once it stands, stock it with Firewood. Firewood is crafted at the Chopping Spot from Short Logs, with one Short Log producing 10 Firewood, and the shed converts that Firewood into Fuel units for the Oven.
The Heat Saver perk lowers the Fuel cost of most Oven recipes, and Cook perks add extra portions to each batch, so it is worth taking them before mass-producing food.
Unlock the Cook perk to reach the mastery requirement
Some dishes need more than a station and ingredients. Recipes such as Baked fish are gated behind a cooking mastery level, and the Oven will block the craft until you meet it. The fix is the Cook perk, purchased in the Inspirations menu, which raises your mastery to the required level.
The Cook perk also creates extra portions of basic dishes, which stacks well with the batch cooking you will do to keep energy topped off. A higher-tier Cook II perk applies the same bonus to more advanced recipes.
Every cooking recipe and its unlock technology
Most recipes are tied to a named cooking technology in the tech tree. Research the technology and the matching dishes appear at the Kitchen Table or Kitchen Oven. The special catch dishes near the end are one-off high-tier meals built around rare fish.
| Technology / unlock | Recipes |
|---|---|
| Bread | Dough, Bread |
| First snacks | Berry Smoothie, Yogurt |
| First dishes | Baked Apple, Baked Mushrooms, Berry Pie |
| Pastries | Muffin, Croissant |
| Vegetable dishes | Vegetable Soup, Vegetable Salad |
| Carrot dishes | Carrot Cutlet, Carrot Soup |
| Beet dishes | Grated Beets, Beet Slices |
| Cabbage dishes | Bowl of Sauerkraut, Cabbage Soup |
| Onion dishes | Onion Rings, Toast with Onions |
| Pumpkin dishes | Pumpkin Soup, Baked Pumpkin |
| Oh No! | Baked Meat, Sandwich |
| Anyway… | Minced Meat, Burger, Lasagna |
| River fish dishes | River Fish Fillet, Fish Nuggets, Baked Fish |
| Sea fish dishes | Sea Fish Fillet, Fish Soup, Baked Salmon |
| Mysterious fish dishes | Mysterious Fish Fillet, Fisherman’s Pie |
| Soldier’s food | Soldier’s Ale, Soldier’s Stew |
| Kraken steak | Kraken Steak |
| Fried golden carp | Fried Golden Carp |
| Heavenly salmon | Heavenly Salmon |
| Elder’s meal | Elder’s Meal |
| Chocolate | Chocolate |
Silver and gold grades of dishes such as Cabbage Soup, Onion Rings, Pumpkin Soup and Bowl of Sauerkraut exist as separate upgrade recipes that must be unlocked individually, on top of the base technology.
Ingredients for the core recipes
Once a recipe is unlocked, these are the base ingredient costs. Fuel amounts shown are the standard Oven cost before Heat Saver. Bread relies entirely on farmed inputs, which makes it one of the easiest dishes to mass-produce for the Master Chef achievement that asks for 100 total meals.
| Recipe | Ingredients | Station |
|---|---|---|
| Dough | 6 Flour, 2 Water | Kitchen Table |
| Bread | 4 Dough, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Berry Smoothie | 4 Berry, 2 Apple | Kitchen Table |
| Yogurt | 1 Jug of Milk, 1 Honey | Kitchen Table |
| Baked Apple | 5 Apple, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Baked Mushrooms | 5 Brown Mushroom, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Berry Pie | 4 Dough, 6 Berry, 20 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Muffin | 4 Dough, 1 Jug of Milk, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Croissant | 4 Dough, 1 Chicken Egg, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Carrot Cutlet | 4 Carrot, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Baked Fish | 2 River fish fillet, 15 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Baked Meat | 1 Flesh, 1 Salt, 15 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Lasagna | 1 Minced Meat, 3 Dough, 25 Fuel | Kitchen Oven |
| Chocolate | 4 Cacao, 10 Fuel | Kitchen Table II |
Flour for Dough is milled from Wheat at the Millstone, and Wheat grows in your Garden, so a single farming loop keeps the whole bread chain running.
Unlock more recipes from vendors and quests
The tech tree does not hand you everything. Additional recipes are bought from vendors or given by NPCs as quest rewards, so side activities directly expand your cookbook. Herm, the merchant in the village, is an early example: bringing him the fish he asks for and advancing his objectives unlocks Baked Fish and other fish dishes.
The higher grade upgrades also depend on unlocks and often on story progress, which is why a station can be built while some of its recipes still refuse to appear. Keep exploring NPC questlines and discovering new ingredients to fill in the remaining entries.
You can confirm everything is in place when the recipe shows up in the Kitchen Table or Kitchen Oven menu with no mastery warning and enough Fuel in the shed. Selecting it starts the craft and produces the dish, which then restores energy the moment you eat it in the field.
