When I leveled Syllvain, I did something I hadn’t done before – I leveled fishing and cooking concurrently.

On my Mage, I made the mistake of leveling to 70 and then realizing that I liked cooking. Raid buffs are yum! On my Paladin, I made the same mistake of leveling to 70 and then realizing that fishing was useful. Golden Fish Sticks ftw! On both characters, I went back and spent hours grinding the professions.

It went a lot smoother when I did it in small chunks as I leveled Syllvain. In an effort to produce my own fishing/cooking guide that syncs up nicely with the zones I used to level, I scanned through the fishing recipes to find the ones that are necessary to level your cooking from 1 to 300.

List of Recipes

Here, then, is a list of recipes needed, along with the skill level that they cover and the approximate number of fish needed to cover that skill level.

Mind you these are not the only recipes you could use to level your cooking. However, I find that it is the most efficient set of recipes, and you will be able to gather the fish in the zones that you’re already leveling in. No need to go out of your way and spend extra traveling time gathering reagents.

A Few Notes About the Table

Some of the earlier fish can be swapped for other recipes. The fish you have depends on the zones you are in. Recipe: Slitherskin Mackerel can be substituted for Recipe: Brilliant Smallfish, and Recipe: Rainbow Fin Albacore can be substituted for Recipe: Longjaw Mud Snapper. You may also come across some Raw Rockscale Cod while fishing. The recipe – Recipe: Rockscale Cod – is only orange for 15 points, so you’ll want to use it up before moving on to Recipe: Mithril Head Trout – which stays orange much longer.

Finally, Recipe: Poached Sunscale Salmon and Recipe: Nightfin Soup don’t need to be done in any particular order or in those quantities. They are each orange from 250 to 275, so you need to cook a total of 25 fish between the two recipes. They are fished in the same zones (i.e. Western Plaguelands), so it makes sense to gather them both rather than focus on one recipe.

After I’ve had some time to mull this over, I’m going to go back and match this up with a list of zones and fishing targets. I’m curious to see what the most efficient route is to catch all of these fish – and how long it will take to level your fishing and cooking up this way.