Vegetable Soup

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Vegetable Soup is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Mountain Salt ×1 — which resolves to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 12 units, plus 24 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,221 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 773 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 16 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 8 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 16 Fire Crystal and 8 Water Crystal.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 92 intermediate up to the Lv 100 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

All 6 raw materials are gathered, and not one of their spots is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Of the intermediates, Mountain Salt has the widest use: 22 recipes call for it, spanning two of the eight crafting classes.