The Bismarck

Taken all the way down to base materials, one The Bismarck is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 5 intermediates — Fermented Butter ×1, Walnut Bread ×1, Smooth Butter ×1 and 2 others — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 17 units, plus 26 crystals.

That bill outweighs 7,161 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 967 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 14 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 12 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 11 Fire Shard, 7 Fire Crystal, 7 Water Crystal and 1 other kind.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 80 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

5 of the 8 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, Table Salt has the widest use: 51 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.