Salt Cod

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

That bill outweighs 3,130 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 392 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 2 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 1 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 2 Fire Shard and 1 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 15 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

Both raw materials are gathered, and no spot for either is timed, so nothing in the tree waits on the Eorzean clock.

Salt Cod is itself consumed by 1 further recipe, all of them Culinarian recipes.