Food is seriously important in Valheim - it’s vital for maintaining your health while roaming through dangerous biomes, and it’s particularly important for boss battles. The snacks are often quite a challenge to make, requiring a mixture of farming, hunting and gathering to acquire the necessary resources, and you can’t just load up on one type of food: your Viking needs a balanced diet to stay happy. All of this, I think, means that making a stack of sausages feels hugely rewarding in Valheim… once you stop thinking about the origins of the entrails.
But what if there were more recipes, using a wider variety of ingredients, and requiring several stages of prep? That’s where the Master Chef mod for Valheim comes in. Made by hrve and available on Nexus Mods, the mod adds 25 new recipes to the game, and even introduces some previously non-edible items as recipes.
I tried the mod out for myself, and I love the range of new recipes it introduces - there’s everything from pancakes to vegetable smoothies. For recipes such as venison head tacos and pig’s head terrine, the mod allows you to use animal trophies as ingredients, providing a neat use for these items (which normally just clog up my chests). If you’re cooking breakfast for guests, I would suggest trying the dragon omelette, as one egg will get you 20 helpings.
The mod also introduces some recipes that require a few layers of prep - before you can make a carrot butter and jelly sandwich, for instance, you’ll need to make a Duke’s Jelly, another recipe that requires cloudberries and honey. To make fried food like neck tail skewers, you’ll first need to make carrot oil, so start saving up some carrot seeds.
It’s worth noting there are some limits to this mod: the food items currently only have 2D sprites and no 3D models, so throwing one on the floor will present you with a similar item from the vanilla game. A lot of the recipes also require items from the Plains, but hrve has said they will consider adding more lower-level recipes in future updates.
Still, it’s a great little mod for those wanting to spice up their games, and a handy way to make use of spare items. If you want to try this out for yourself, you’ll first need to install BepInEx and JotunnLib, as these are necessary prerequisites for the mod to work. Mod author hrve has also provided a useful diagram of the correct folder structure, so check out the Master Chef mod description to make sure you’ve got it all set up correctly.
