Black Truffle Risotto ★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Black Truffle Risotto is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Cottage Cheese ×1 and Cider Vinegar ×1 — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 6 units, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,542 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 531 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

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

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 16 intermediate up to the Lv 50 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

4 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Black Truffle (13:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Cottage Cheese has the widest use: 5 recipes call for it, spanning two of the eight crafting classes.