Battered Fish

Taken all the way down to base materials, one Battered Fish is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Olive Oil ×1 and Table Salt ×1 — which resolve to 4 distinct raw materials totalling 7 units, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,963 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 599 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 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 3 Fire Shard and 1 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, so one class covers the whole chain.

One intermediate outranks the result: Olive Oil is a Lv 11 Culinarian recipe feeding a Lv 5 craft, so that step, not the last one, is the real gate.

3 of the 4 raw materials match a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 1 comes from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.