How to Make Soups and Stews in Minecraft - For Dummies

You have to eat. And that doesn’t mean running out to your local grocery store. In Minecraft, you must gather all the materials you need for food and then make it yourself.

Brewing mushroom stew

If you’re in a mushroom-rich biome, harvesting mushrooms in addition to meat sources provides ample food. Mushroom stew (sometimes referred to as soup) is a shapeless recipe that is crafted by placing a bowl, a red mushroom, and a brown mushroom anywhere on a crafting grid. The bowl will be returned to the player upon consumption.

Mushrooms are occasionally farmed (an impractical and slow process) but also found abundantly in certain biomes, including the swamp, forest, and, of course, Mushroom Islands.

The stew cannot be stacked, so it must be consumed. However, the individual ingredients (bowls and mushrooms) can be stacked and stored so that food can be easily crafted as you continue through the game.

Mushrooms cannot be eaten alone unless they’re crafted into stew. Mushrooms are also used in red dye and in brewing fermented spider eyes.

Making beetroot soup

This incredibly nourishing soup heals 4 health hearts, but can be found only in the Pocket Edition. Beetroot is less common than wheat but provides three times the health when crafted into soup, compared to wheat-based bread.

To craft the soup, place the beetroots with a bowl.

Cooking rabbit stew

Rabbit stew is a recipe that’s new to Minecraft 1.8. Although the recipe is complicated, it provides an incredible 10 hunger points and 12 saturation points, ranking it as a cross between cake and a golden carrot. However, most players will find that eating the separate ingredients is more effective, because eating them separately still provides more hunger and saturation points.

To craft, place cooked rabbit in the top middle slot, add a carrot, and then baked potato, and then a mushroom (of either type) in the middle row, and place a bowl in the bottom middle slot.