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Your realistic options
Cooking is awkward to boost. There is no tradeable pie that adds +4 the way botanical or mushroom pies do for other skills, so the choice comes down to how many levels you are short.
One level short: eat one of the Dorgeshuun dishes. Eel sushi, fillets, grubs à la mode, loach, mushrooms and roast frog each give +1 Cooking. They are untradeable and come from the Gourmets in Dorgesh-Kaan, who hand them out at random when you sell them food; eel sushi, for example, turns up about once in 20 sales. Eel sushi also heals 10, the rest only 2 or 3.
Two to five levels short: make spicy stew with three doses of orange spice. Orange spice covers the production skills, Cooking among them, and every stew rolls a change from -5 to +5. Keep eating until the skill tab shows what you need. You need Evil Dave's part of Recipe for Disaster done and a cat to catch hell-rats in his basement for the spice.
At 99: the Cooking cape adds +1, though its real value is that you stop burning nearly everything while wearing it.
| Boost | Levels | Tradeable | Where from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dorgeshuun dishes | +1 | No | Gourmets in Dorgesh-Kaan |
| Spicy stew (orange spice) | -5 to +5 | No | Recipe for Disaster (Evil Dave) |
| Cooking cape | +1 | No | 99 Cooking |
Cooking levels people boost for
A boost lets you cook the food early. Eating food never checks your Cooking level. That means boosting is mostly about diary tasks, quest steps and getting a head start on a new fish.
| Food | Cooking needed | Heals |
|---|---|---|
| Shark | 80 | 20 |
| Sea turtle | 82 | 21 |
| Halibut | 83 | 20 |
| Anglerfish | 84 | Up to 22 |
| Wild pie | 85 | 11 per bite |
| Dark crab | 90 | 22 |
| Manta ray | 91 | 22 |
| Marlin | 91 | 24 |
| Summer pie | 95 | 11 per bite |
Cooking these at your exact unlock level burns a lot, so boosting to cook them as training rarely saves money. Cooking gauntlets from Family Crest lower the burn rate on lobsters, swordfish, monkfish, sharks and anglerfish, and they are a better fix than a boost if burning is the problem.
How long a boost lasts
Visible boosts fall one level per minute. The drain runs on a fixed background cycle, so the first level can tick away within seconds of eating. A +1 dish therefore gives you anything from a few seconds to a minute; have the raw food in your inventory and stand next to the range before you eat it. Boosts never stack. A dish on top of a stew does nothing unless the stew rolled below +1.
Players with 55 Prayer and the Chambers of Xeric scroll can slow the drain to one level per 90 seconds, once that effect has been running for 15 seconds.
Achievement diaries and quests
Diary tasks accept boosted levels, which is the main reason anyone stockpiles orange stews. Quests are case by case: many accept a boost, some say "not boostable" in their requirements. Check the requirement list before you spend an evening rolling stews.
For the cost and xp of every food, open the Cooking calculator. The cooking training osrs guide covers the cheapest route to 99, Cooking money makers lists the fish that cook at a profit today, and best food in OSRS compares heals per coin.