Sauerkraut

Taken all the way down to base materials, a batch of 3 Sauerkraut is 2 crafting steps deep and needs 1 intermediate — Table Salt ×1 — which resolves to 5 distinct raw materials totalling 5 units, plus 9 crystals.

That bill outweighs 4,201 of the 13,602 recipes tracked here and 491 of the 1,058 Culinarian ones, and 4,464 recipes nest deeper.

Only 8 of those crystals go into the final step; the other 1 are burned by the intermediates, so the real crystal cost is 5 Fire Shard and 4 Water Shard.

Every step is Culinarian work, from a Lv 1 intermediate up to the Lv 36 finish, so one class covers the whole chain.

4 of the 5 raw materials match a gathering node, none of them timed; the other 1 comes from vendors, drops or content this site does not track.

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