Borscht

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Borscht is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 2 intermediates — Garlean Cheese ×1 and Northern Sea Salt ×1 — which resolve to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 15 units, plus 31 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,735 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 891 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 15 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 16 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 24 Fire Crystal and 7 Water Crystal.

Every step is Culinarian work, so one class covers the whole chain.

One intermediate outranks the result: Garlean Cheese is a Lv 84 Culinarian recipe feeding a Lv 83 craft, so that step, not the last one, is the real gate.

3 of the 5 raw materials match a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 2 come from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.