Tale of Two Towns Cooking Recipes :
Introduction to Cooking and the Cooking Festivals
New to Two Towns and cooking is that there are 2 ways you can learn recipes. The first is the usual way, by cooking something new with the proper ingredients, and then the recipe will be recorded. But the new way is you can learn new recipes by being inspired after you cook one recipe. This mainly happens if you cook with an existing dish, but alter it by adding extra ingredients and then you will be told you learnt how to make another dish. Then all you have to do is look at the recipe and it will tell you what you need, so that makes things easier to a degree.
You can also, like in past Harvest Moon games, find recipes by looking at books in different villagers homes. It wont record the recipe, so you will have to remember it, and then cook it yourself to get the recipe. In Tale of Two Towns, there are a total of 273 different dishes you can make!
You will receive the Pot for free on Spring 8th From Yun if you are living in Konohana or from Howard if your living in Bluebell. To get the Frying pan and Seasoning Set, you have to complete requests from Yun in Konohana to get them. They will cost you some money and require a certain cooked dish. So keep an eye out for them on the request board.
Why Cooking in Two Towns is Important
The main objective in Two Towns is to settle a dispute that took place 100 years earlier between the villages of Bluebell and Konohana. Each town insulted the other’s cooking and then decided to have weekly cooking contests to decide which towns cooking was better. There is a huge mountain between the towns, with a tunnel that ran through it, but after they were fighting, the Harvest Goddess with her infinite wisdom blocked the tunnel, but for some reason needs you to get the current mayors to becomes friends before she will allow the tunnel to be cleared, which you also have to do.
The Cooking Festivals
Different from past games where there was only 1 cooking festival each year, in Two Towns there is 1 cooking festival every week! It goes in order of what type of dish you need to make. It goes in the order of Salad, Soup, Main Dish, Dessert. The appetizer and other category of recipes is not used in the festivals. For your 1st spring the mayor of the town you choose to live in will bring you the ingredients for entering a dish. But starting in your 1st summer you will need to find stuff to make yourself.
It is stated that what counts most in the cooking contests is not the complexity of the dish, but the quality of the ingredients that are used. So essentially, the higher the star quality, 1-5, the higher chance you have at winning. But it has been found through game play that adding the optional ingredients that are available for most recipes will increase your chances of winning even more.
The way the festivals work is there are 3 random characters from Bluebell chosen for one team, and then 3 from Konohana. If you choose to enter then you will be with 2 characters from the town you chose to live in. The computer characters will enter dishes along with yours, but it is an accumulative score that you get from Gourmet Pierre. So in short, you can enter an awesome 5 star dish, but if someone on your team enters a failed dish which happens occasionally, chances are your going to lose, even if your dish was perfect.
If you win a cooking festival you will receive a prize afterwards, which will vary depending on how far in the game you are. And afterwards the Harvest Goddess will show you the friendship meter between the 2 mayors, which consists of 10 hearts. If you win, it will go up significantly. If you lose it will still go up, just not as much and you will still receive a consolation prize, which will more then likely be a bag of seeds which you normally wouldn’t get until year 2, this will unlock the seeds for year 1, so sometimes losing isn’t always bad! You can also choose not to enter at all. If you choose this you will be in the crows watching the festival, and the heart meter for the mayors friendship will only go up a tiny bit. Once you get the mayors friendship meter filled you will be able to clear the tunnel between the games.
Starting Recipes and Categories
As mentioned earlier there are 273 recipes split into 6 different categories. At the beginning of the game you will start with a few recipes in each category. These are listed below.
Salad:
# of Salad Recipes: 14
Starting Recipes: Turnip Salad
Hints: Most of the salad recipes don’t need a utensil which makes them easy to make, provided you have the right ingredients on hand.
Soup:
# of Soup Recipes: 16
Starting Recipes: Radish Soup
Hints: All soup recipes require that you use the pot. Depending on which town you chose to live in, you will be given the pot by either Howard in Bluebell, or Yun in Konohana on Spring 8th of your 1st year.
Appetizers:
# of Appetizer Recipes: 64
Starting Recipes: Sauteed Turnips, Roasted Mushroom. Sandwich, Sashimi, Tofu
Hints: These recipes aren’t included in the cooking contests mainly because most of the dishes require processed items like butter or cheese and you can only make these if you live in Bluebell.
Main Dish:
# of Main Dish Recipes: 73
Starting Recipes: Marinated Fish
Hints: This is the largest category of recipes in Two towns. Lots of these are easy to make because lots of recipes can be made with wild items or crops and animal products.
Dessert:
# of Dessert Recipes: 54
Starting Recipes: Cookies, Soybean Rice Candy
Hints: Lots of these recipes require the Chocolate Pack, which is made on the Bluebell farm using Cocoa beans in the maker. But if your living in Konohana, no need to worry, there is plenty you can make without the chocolate. The easiest is once you get a cow and a chicken, you can make Pudding which, if you have a good heart level with your animals, is simple to make. So keep an eye out for the recipe in this category!
Other:
# of Other Recipes: 52
Starting Recipes: Cooked Rice, Bread, Strawberry Jam, Hot Coffee, Hot Milk
Hints: These 52 dishes don’t really fit into the other categories and are mostly items you need to make in turn to make another dish. Also there are all the recipes for drinks like tea etc.