Shepherd's Pie

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Shepherd's Pie is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Smooth Butter ×1 — which resolves to 6 distinct raw materials totalling 7 units, plus 4 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,963 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 599 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 3 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 1 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 3 Fire Shard and 1 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 7 intermediate up to the Lv 23 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

4 of the 6 raw materials match a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 2 come from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.

Of the intermediates, Smooth Butter has the widest use: 33 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.