1-19:
When starting at level 1, the best thing to cook would be shrimp. Many will burn, but shrimp isn’t too expensive, and if you really wanted to, you could fish it, although I would suggest buying it because it saves time and it doesn’t really cost a lot. As you gain cooking levels, you will notice that you will burn less and less, but the levels will take longer to obtain.
If you wanted to cook something else at these levels, it’s alright, but shrimp is cheap and good pace for this level range.
20-39:
Cooking speeds up a little more here. Starting at 20, I suggest that you switch to trout since it gives more xp than shrimp, and shrimp gets significantly slower as you gain levels. You will burn trout at the beginning, and you may burn a lot, but it shouldn’t be a huge problem, seeing that trout’s not expensive either. Also, around level 30, I suggest either starting salmon with trout or stopping trout to cook salmon – just to speed things up. It shouldn’t cost you too much if you sell the cooked food back; but even if you don’t, it won’t cost you much.
40-63:
Alright, at level 40, you’re able to cook lobsters. However, at this low of a cooking level, you would burn lobsters a lot, and unless you’re willing to waste some money burning some lobsters, I suggest sticking with salmon or trout. You won’t burn these too much anymore, and lobsters wouldn’t be super fast xp at these levels, considering how many you’d be burning.
64-79:
At level 64, things change a little. If you have cooking gauntlets (explained later) and you have them wielded, you won’t burn lobsters anymore! So, if you do have them, I would start cooking lobsters. These do lose a little money over time (see post 7 for calculations), but if you do have about 6 or 7 million to spend on 99 cooking, then yes, this is definitely the best option.
80-93:
Congratulations on 80 cooking! You can now cook sharks, although I highly suggest that you not . At this level, you’d be burning them quite a bit, even with cooking gauntlets, so I would still stick with lobsters. But, I also cooked a little monkfish during this time. Sadly, even with your cooking level is in the 80’s, you still burn monkfish, even without cooking gauntlets, but they won’t burn as much as sharks do at these levels. If you want to save a little more money, I’d stay with lobsters.
94-99:
Congratulations on 94 cooking! You’re more than half way to 99! Whoo ! At this point, I’d recommend switching to sharks, because starting at 94, you won’t burn any sharks (assuming you have cooking gauntlets)! From here to 99, I suggest cooking sharks. You’ll need over 20k of them, but it is much faster than cooking lobsters the rest of the way.