Small details make cooking even better in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

polygon.com:

There are two ways to cook in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, just like in the original The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: You can place food items near a fire to roast them into more effective snacks, or toss them into a bowl over a fire to cook a proper meal. On paper, cooking in both games is simply the mechanic by which Link can heal and power himself up. The right dish can load the hero back up with hearts lost squabbling with Bokoblins or warm his bones enough to take on freezing temperatures.

But Nintendo made cooking compelling in Breath of the Wild, a bright spot of simple joy in a sprawling video game world. There are more than 100 recipes in Breath of the Wild, and even more in Tears of the Kingdom; it’s delightful to experiment with ingredients to make new dishes or power-ups, listening to Link hum while carrots and beef dance in the simmering pot. Cooking, even the simplest forms in video games, has a way of grounding the world it exists in, creating a link between our world and the game’s own — in this case, Hyrule. There’s so much emotion and meaning behind food and culture, and cooking mechanics in games pull on those threads, invoking that feeling in the world.

Breath of the Wild’s cooking mechanics did just that, but Tears of the Kingdom’s somehow made the mechanic better.

Functionally, cooking works the same in Tears of the Kingdom as it does in Breath of the Wild — roast over a flame or cook in a pot to create food with different variables, like cold resistance or increased attack damage. But Nintendo’s addition of recipe cards makes cooking even easier; in the materials menu, you can now click “Select for recipe” on an ingredient to pull up recipe cards showing how you’ve made