Sachertorte ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Sachertorte is 4 crafting steps deep and needs 8 intermediates — Bubble Chocolate ×1, Smooth Butter ×1, Sunset Wheat Flour ×1 and 5 others — which resolve to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 15 units, plus 12 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,735 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 891 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 1 recipe nests deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 9 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 8 Fire Shard, 2 Fire Cluster, 1 Water Cluster and 1 other kind.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 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: Apricot (9:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Smooth Butter has the widest use: 33 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.