Herring Pie ★★★

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Herring Pie is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Upland Wheat Flour ×1 — which resolves to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 13 units, plus 11 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,426 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 825 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 7 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 7 Fire Crystal, 2 Fire Cluster and 2 Water Cluster.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 74 intermediate up to the Lv 80 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

5 of the 6 raw materials come out of the ground, and 2 of them are time-gated: Ala Mhigan Salt Crystal (0:00, 12:00) and Mist Spinach (0:00, 12:00). The widest gap between consecutive opening times is 12 Eorzean hours, about 35 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Upland Wheat Flour has the widest use: 61 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.