There are eight different cooking ingredients in Witch Hand:

• Gem Fruit
  
• Ninth Honey
  
• Veggiefish
  
• Shield Nut
  
• Pepberry
  
• Witch's Wheat
  
• Inky Mushroom
  
• Void Spice
  
  They can be obtained occasionally through an explore card, consistently through a greenhouse building, or purchased with cooking tokens from the ingredient store at a rate of two tokens per ingredients.
  
  Cooking tokens can be obtained by placing any ingredient in a food processor building
  
  Cooking requires two ingredients, a cauldron, and either a witch or familiar. Any familiar can be used for cooking not requiring apprentices.
  
  In the late game this process can be easily automated with the auto spell caster. However food processors will pull indiscriminately from nexus storage making it difficult to automate token crafting so it may be easier to just build two storage nexuses to hold every ingredient type and manually bulk craft tokens when needed or simply sell the excess unused ingredients.

Honeyed Treat
Consumable: Restore 2 hp (familiar or witch)
Gem Fruit + Ninth Honey

Diamond Pie
No effect, sells for 6
Gem Fruit + Veggiefish

Speedy Roast
Consumable: +50% work rate for 300 seconds (2 days)
Ninth Honey + Veggiefish

Armored Smoothie
Consumable: +1 armor (familiar only) (armor cannot exceed max HP)
Veggiefish + Shield Nut

Explosive Berry Salad
Weapon: deals 2 damage
Pepberry + Void Spice

Flame Cake
Consumable: +1 Attack (familiar only)
Witch's Wheat + Pepberry

Friendly Soup
Slotted: Increase villages production count by 1, expires after 300 seconds (2 days) of use

Archivist's Pasta
Slotted: Improves village's production speed by 10%, expires after 300 seconds (2 days) of use
Witch's Wheat + Inky Mushroom

In the early game cooking is very limited in it's usefulness. You should avoid selling your early ingredients if possible, unless this prevents you from progressing, as they are worth much more cooked.

Honeyed treats are a great safety net early on. Damage is fairly permanent before you have a steady supply of Silversage and, more difficulty, a stockpile/source of Reagents. Against weak void each 2 hp healed represents two monsters slain and even later on feeding a stack of them to you're heavy hitters can be the difference between life and death. Late game they fall of significantly as they are less resource efficient and more time consuming than the healing wave spell. Make them when you can, try to have two or three in reserve for emergencies.

Basically: make a few early game then forget about them


Diamond pies are useful early on when money is tight but after you get five or six buildings slotted they stop being worth much.

Basically: make one or two early on if its convenient then forget about them.


Speedy Roasts are a bit niche only really being useful very early on before summoning more then a few familiars. If you have the ingredients two days of +50% work speed is great for exploration but familiars make this pretty pointless mid game. This item is even less useful late game as building production speed and Moondrops are often the main bottleneck.

Basically: make them if you happen upon the right ingredients and give them to your witch. forget about them after you have two or three familiars.


Armored Smoothies are great for stockpiling as they function like a familiar only version of the much more expensive Umbral Shield. Healing is still faster and more resource efficient so this is more of a thing to use in tougher fights. Fun late game but less useful for anything beyond tanking enemies that would kill your familiars even at max HP.

Basically: Keep a few around for utility and automate them late game out of a paranoid hoarding instinct


Friendly Soup is the best dish to cook and you should save all of your Ninth honey and Inky mushrooms in the mid game/beyond to make them. They function very similarly to the celestial link accept this is the only version you get with the character. Placing one in your village double everything they produce and this effect is applied for every recipe allowing you to benefit multiple times for items with multiple steps. They are a little annoying since you need to replace them every two in game days so this is only really viable if you can automate mass ingredient production. If you only have the one or two of them definitely place them in your villages that make high value items like mana and heartstones. They are also very good next to building that produce anything umbra as you can get more out of the rare resources.

Basically: use them mid/late game whenever possible, try to clump your production buildings together if you have a limited supply.


Archivist's Pasta is conversely the worst recipe. It is also a time limited item but instead of double items you get +10% speed. Even in a best case scenario you can get at most a six buildings covered by this effect effectively being worth 0.6 of just adding another copy of what you need. They technically can stack but this has an even worse return. Just add more copies of a building if you need more of something.

Basically: Never use this



Flame Cake is another great recipe basically being a cheaper version of the umbral sword. The big draw here is that its not bottle necked by void salt instead allowing you to spam greenhouses to get as much of the stuff as you want. The +1 damage stays with the familiar even after resurrection so feeding every unit you have can be a great idea. The most useful number to reach is attack 4 as it allows you to one shot most enemies in the game. Aside from that it can also be a good idea to pick a fated familiar and buff their attack up to something big like twenty or even fifty just for fun.

Basically: you can never have too many of these. Late game attacks will get pretty aggressive and you will need attack buffs to deal with them.


Explosive Berry Salad is another very useful recipe working like a weaker fireball that isn't bottle necked by spell pages. Aside from just deleting enemies you don't want to deal with they work best against the glass cannon enemies that can one shot full health familiars and the frozen enemies if you don't have enough units to deal with everything. A stock of five is generally enough.

Basically: Keep a steady stock of them, they will save you from unavoidable familiar deaths



Overall
Most of these recipes are pretty opportunistic in the sense that you make them when you have the supplies to do so. I don't think it's really worth using the ingredient store as its kinda a waste of resources so I'd just get a few greenhouses to give you a steady supply. I find its worth it to build two nexuses to hold all the ingredients (lock them with right click so they filter even when empty) then automate the two or three recipes you want just selling the rest. The endgame scaling potential with the Flame cake is crazy since you don't need to rely on any void salt allowing you to get some pretty crazy attack numbers with much sooner. That being said I'd still rank this character as much weaker than the other two and the timed buffs can be very annoying to keep up.