Baked Onion Soup

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Baked Onion Soup is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 6 intermediates — Chicken Stock ×1, Cream Cheese ×1, Knight's Bread ×1 and 3 others — which resolve to 12 distinct raw materials totalling 19 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,589 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 994 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 6 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 18 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 14 Fire Shard, 4 Water Shard, 3 Fire Crystal and 1 other kind.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 4 intermediate up to the Lv 52 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

7 of the 12 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Volcanic Rock Salt (17:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Sweet Cream has the widest use: 26 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.