Grilled Warmwater Trout

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Grilled Warmwater Trout is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Table Salt ×1 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 3 units, plus 3 crystals.

That bill outweighs 3,373 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 427 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 1 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 2 Fire Shard and 1 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 20 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 3 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Table Salt has the widest use: 51 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.