Eel Pie

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Eel Pie is 3 crafting steps deep and needs 4 intermediates — Pie Dough ×1, Smooth Butter ×1, Sunset Wheat Flour ×1 and 1 other — which resolve to 8 distinct raw materials totalling 12 units, plus 8 crystals.

That bill outweighs 6,221 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 773 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 337 recipes nest deeper.

Only 4 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 4 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 6 Fire Shard and 2 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 25 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

6 of the 8 raw materials come out of the ground, and one of them is time-gated: Black Eel (17:00). That window comes round once per Eorzean day, every 70 real-world minutes.

Of the intermediates, Table Salt has the widest use: 51 recipes call for it, all of them Culinarian recipes.