Cook
 Cook |
Superiors: Head of Personnel
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Department head:
Head of Personnel
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You are the less-alcoholic half of the Maltese Falcon (The bar).
You cook food, blend veggies and fruits, grind bodies for meat, stick monkeys and xenos onto meat hooks for meat. And kill people who mess with you, with your kitchen knife.
Overview
As a Chef it's your primary job to keep customers fed. You have free reign over managing your menus and styling your kitchen and restaurant to your liking. You should have a fellow Chef to share the kitchen, or a cook. You share the dining area outside of the bar and should coordinate with the bartender to keep the whole place running well. It is important to also get your menu set up and handed out so the crew has both advertising, and an idea of the theme you've set up for food this shift!
You should also make sure you are setting up proper prices for your meals. Cash or card, it's important to get a revenue coming in so you are always able to afford Cargo orders or, if there's no botany, growing your own produce in the surface garden!
Equipment
You get a lot of cool kitchen related things, like these:
- 2 Meat Spikes. You can use these to butcher monkeys for a high volume of meat.
- A gibber. You can throw almost anything in the gibber (except people when it's functioning properly!) and get meat. It's only cost effective for large mobs such as cows. Is this ethical...?
- A machine that can dispense trays, plates, cups, and knives.
- 2 microwaves that will form the backbone of your food preperation.
- A Smart Fridge to hold product.
- A CondiMaster that allows you to separate and bottle liquid ingredients.
- Shutters to close you in for privacy or other things.
- A Blender to create liquids or powders.
- Drinks dispenser that will also dispense some ingredients, such as sugar.
- In absence of a gardener, you start with a box filled with 8 random commonly used vegetables and fruit.
This is a Knife, and That is a Rolling Pin
The knife and the rolling pin on your table are invaluable in making food. You can cut cheese very easy with the knife, slice foods like pizza and cakes, and prepare other foods (test what you can cut with it). Some animals can be butchered with the knife as well. The rolling pin, meanwhile, is used to flatten certain ingredients, such as dough.
Other than that, they are also weapons! The knife, in particular, is an excellent melee weapon .Tinker with your vending machines, and you can get even stronger security risks knives!
Ingredients Boxes
Besides the basics that your kitchen is initially stocked with, you will start out with a randomly selected box of less common ingredients in your backpack. The box should contain enough ingredients for you to get started before your botany buddies ignore you and smoke weed can provide you with a steady supply of fresh produce.
| Box | Contents |
|---|---|
| Fiesta | 1 tortilla, 2 corn, 2 soybeans, 2 chili |
| Italian | 3 tomatoes, 3 Meatballs, 1 bottle of wine |
| Vegetarian | 2 carrots, 1 eggplant, 1 potato, 1 apple, 1 corn, 1 tomato |
| American | 2 potato, 2 tomato, 2 corn, 1 Meatball |
| Fruity | 2 apples, 2 oranges, 1 lemon, 1 lime, 1 watermelon |
| Sweets | 2 cherries, 2 bananas, 1 chocolate bar, 1 cocoa pod, 1 apple |
| Delights | 2 sweet potatoes, 2 blue cherries, 1 vanilla pod, 1 cocoa pod, 1 berry |
| Grains | 3 oats, 1 wheat, 1 cocoa pod, 1 honeycomb, 1 poppy seed |
| Carnivore | 1 bear meat, 1 spider meat, 1 spider eggs, 1 carp meat, 1 xeno meat, 1 corgi meat, 1 Meatball |
| Exotic | 2 carp meat, 2 soybeans, 2 cabbage, 1 chili |
| Wildcard | 7 randomly selected from (duplicates allowed): chili, tomato, carrot, potato, sweet potato, apple, chocolate bar, cherry, banana, cabbage, soybeans, corn, plump helmet, chanterelle |
Menu Making
A menu can help set up the theme for your restraunt. When you get one prepared, copy off about 40 of them and get a few assistants to hand them out and set them on every table.
There are many ways to format your menu. Be sure to be creative! The only things you need are the meals and their prices. Everything else is up to you!
Some examples are below.
Menu formats
Menu 1
Menu 1
[u][large][center]Skyrat Restaurante[/center][/large][/u] [b]Breakfast Specials[/b] - [meal] - [credits] [b]Lunch Specials[/b] - [meal] - [credits] [b]Dinner Specials[/b] - [meal] - [credits]
Menu 2
Menu 2
The Kitchen menu! Breakfast Specials - [meal] - [credits] Drink Options - [x] Lunch Specials - [meal] - [credits] Drink Options - [x] Dinner Specials - [meal] - [credits] Drink Options - [x]
Recipes
Main Article: Guide to food and drinks.
Department Finances
Paying For Stuff With Your Own Hard Earned Revenue
Sometimes you need to buy things for your kitchen. Cargo provides many unique items that are not immediately available in the kitchen that can help you make new recipes. You need to use department funds to pay for department purchases - it would be very unfair for you to pay out of pocket for kitchen expenses!
It is also helpful when there is no botanist. There is a garden on the surface level where you can spend money to buy and grow seeds into various produce. Taking money for your starting menu, and using the money to pay for seeds to grow into produce that you then make into food to sell to crew for a profit, is already creating a whole mini-game that you can do even without your botanist ally.
Try to see what other things you can do with your funds! As long as you try to stay in the black...
Cooking and You
Experimenting is unfortunately not rewarded with using the microwave. You'll just end up with a burned mess that is NOT good to eat. If a microwave gets dirty, you'll need to give it a blast of Space Cleaner. If a microwave gets broken, you'll need some either a wrench or a screwdriver to repair it.
The processor and the blender are much more forgiving. The processor will only take things that it recognizes and the blender will blend any food item (granted, you might not get anything interesting out of it).
You can cut various dishes with the knife you have, such as cheese wheels and pizzas.
Deep Fried Butter
If you enjoy freedom, you can cook things by putting them in the deep fryer. Even objects that aren't normally edible can be fried and then eaten. To use the deep fryer, put something in it, and it will begin soaking in the greasy goodness. The fryer will emit a sound after some time to signify that it's officially fried, but true cooks leave it little bit longer for that perfect deep fry.
Deep fryers use cooking oil to cook things put into it. It starts with 25 units, and uses 0.05 per tick by default. As food fries, it gains more cooking oil internally, with overfried foods having a massive amount of cooking oil in them. Deep fryers require cooking oil in order to fry food. You can't just use water or any other reagent. However, as long as there's enough cooking oil to fry with, the fried food will transfer any reagents in the fryer to itself, meaning that you can put healthy flavor-enhancers in it to saturate the food you fry in it.
You can find cooking oil yourself inside of a vat in your freezer, which has 1000 units of it by default. Cooking oil itself has a few special properties - hot oil splashed on people will deal a hefty amount of burn damage scaling with temperature (capping at 35 burn per reaction), it makes floors slippery, and it automatically fries foods it comes in contact with!
If you have an aggressive grip on someone you're pulling, you can click on the fryer to dunk their face into the hot oil, dealing huge burn damage and knocking them down. This will use half of the reagents in the fryer, though, so repeated dunkings will use them up very quickly. If you can get your hands on some hotter liquids, then your deep fryer can become hilariously deadly, but remember that it needs cooking oil to actually do the frying part.
Screaming for Ice Cream
The ice cream cart makes for an effective way of taking desserts on the go. To use the ice cream vat, simply select a flavor, dispense a waffle cone. and use the empty cone on the cart. Easy peasy!
The ice cream cart comes stocked with vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and blue flavored frozen goodness. However, you can make custom flavors! If you insert a container with a liquid inside, like orange juice or coffee, any custom scoops you serve will be made using said liquid. Containers can be removed from the cart by alt-clicking on it with an empty hand.
If you run out of ice cream or cones, you can make more by clicking on the appropriate buttons inside the cart's interface. These are made using reagents inside the vat, which will need to be replenished after being depleted. Simply insert a container holding ingredients, and click the "refill from beaker" button on the interface to transfer them to the ice cream vat. Take care that you don't add more than you need, as the vat can only hold a limited volume of reagents, and the only way to make space is to purge an entire ingredient type. Waste not, want not!
Hydroponics
Your neighbor, hydroponics, is tasked mainly with growing vegetables and fruits for you to use in your dishes. They will dump what they produce into the smart fridge that is located in both of your walls. Be sure to tell them what to grow, as they are currently incapable of reading your mind. A good starting task to tell them is to grow wheat, tomatoes, and potatoes, as these plants are used most in your recipes. After they have those, just request plants as needed. They are also capable of producing milk and meat with biomass, which can become very useful if you do not have a cargo staff to order cattle from.
If you have no gardener, you can access the surface garden.
Ordering chickens for the gardener is a good step to take if you know you'll be needing more eggs than the ones you start with. Feed them with wheat to get them to lay eggs. Unattended eggs may hatch into more chickens. Chickens can also be put into the meat grinder to make chicken meat.
Homeopathy
All food contains the universal ingredient called "Nutriment." It's what nourishes you and heals your injuries when you eat. Although food might not heal you as quickly as the doctor can (or from the more exotic dangers of the station), it can often heal for more over time. Blending down a bunch of donuts and burgers into a nice nutriment shake can be just the right pick-me-up after having the shit beat out of you.
Healthy foods also contain "Vitamin" which heals you better and can strengthen your metabolism against viruses and harmful chemicals as well as increase the effect of medicine on you.
Blending
All food contains the universal ingredient called "Nutriment." It's what nourishes you and heals your injuries when you eat. Although food might not heal you as quickly as the doctor can, and won't heal the more unusual types of damage, it can often heal for more over time.
You can blend anything that comes from botany, and pretty much all food. Nutriment can be added to your dishes to make them more filling. Some plants contain other liquids that can be used as condiments or as ingredients in food.
Close-Quarters Cooking
As of an initiative by Nanotrasen, all cooks are implanted with a skillchip teaching them close-quarters combat, or CQC for short. To protect their workplace from certain people who like to hop the tables to mess up your day and, more importantly, your precious cooking. This functions very similar to the CQC martial art that nuclear operatives can buy from their uplink - it shares the move set, as well as its bonuses, and is mechanically identical. However, your CQC only works in the kitchen and cold room. As soon as you step foot outside of this area, your unarmed skills revert to normal.
CQC is pretty damn powerful. You can view the moveset in-game by using the button titled Remember The Basics in your CQC tab. If you need a refresher, you can also find the moveset on the Syndicate Items entry for the CQC manual. Of course, yours only works in the kitchen and coldroom, but the moves are the same.
Tips
- Combining Blood and Cryoxadone will generate meat in the reaction - Chemistry can sometimes be your greatest supplier .
- Kitchen knives and cleavers can be stored on your Apron, and knives are small enough to fit in your pockets as well.
- You can color eggs with crayons.
- You can make colored burgers by adding a crayon of your choice to the ingredients.
- You can put a tray on your belt. They can carry up to 7 items of tiny or small size, making them more versatile (but bulkier) than toolbelts or fanny packs.
- You can rename dishes and add unique descriptions by using a pen on a food item. Turn your plain spaghetti into exotic udon with a mere scribble!
- Try asking science to upgrade your food processor. It can dramatically reduce ingredient consumption for a wide variety of dishes including sausages, spaghetti, meat buns and more!