Vermicelli

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Vermicelli is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Highland Flour ×3 — which resolves to 3 distinct raw materials totalling 7 units, plus 15 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 8 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 7 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 15 Fire Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 52 intermediate up to the Lv 56 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 3 raw materials are gathered, and one of them is time-gated: Abalathian Rock Salt (10:00, 22:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Vermicelli is itself consumed by 15 further recipes, all of them Culinarian recipes.