The Noodles of Elpis

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 The Noodles of Elpis is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Garlean Cheese ×1, Sweet Cream ×1, Vermicelli ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 17 units, plus 40 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 16 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 24 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Fire Crystal, 16 Fire Shard and 8 Water Crystal.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 6 intermediate up to the Lv 88 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

4 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, 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.

Of the intermediates, Sweet Cream has the widest use: 26 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.