Pokémon Sword and Shield Curry Dex explained

Making curry in Pokémon Sword and Shield is a fun little minigame that you can waste a lot of time on while camping. But completing the Curry Dex can also seem a little intimidating. 

There are 151 different types of curry in the game, which is the exact same number of Pokémon in the original games. And to supplement that total, there’s a system to making each one that, once you figure out, makes it simple to cook them all—though your Pokémon are likely to get a stomach ache if you do it all at once.

Each recipe is achieved by combining the main ingredient and a combination of up to 10 berries. Your goal is to mix all of the flavors together to create various dishes that revolve around the main ingredient. 

Each dish will have a basic recipe along with an additional five based on the various flavor combinations: Spicy, Dry, Sweet, Bitter, and Sour. That means you’ll have to cook the same recipe six ways to complete that section of your Curry Dex. 

Here’s how you get each variant of a main ingredient’s dish to complete all six recipes with the highest quality rating, at least for the ingredient portion of the grading process.

It doesn’t matter what the main ingredient is, but you must use 10 berries that share the same taste to guarantee yourself the proper results—especially since you’ll need to do it so many times to fill out the Curry Dex. 

Here’s a full list of each main ingredient and what they become once you make a curry using them. Just remember that you’ll need to make six variants of each using different berries. 

And two of the items are exclusive to each version of the game. So have fun trading so you can cook.

Similar to how Mew is an addition to the original 150 Pokémon, the 151st recipe is a special dish that can only be made in one way. Using the main ingredient called Gigantamix, you can create the Gigantamax Curry, which will be the same no matter what berry combination you use. 

But speaking of differences in how you cook the dishes, each berry is put into one or more categories based on the taste it adds to a dish. That’s the main factor in controlling which version of a recipe is made because if you overpower something using too many spicy berries, you’ll almost always end up getting the Spicy variant of a dish. 

You can usually tell what taste a berry gives to a dish, such as a Cheri Berry being Spicy or an Aspear Berry being Sour, by checking it in the ingredients menu before you start cooking

The last thing you need to take into account when cooking is the quality of your ingredients and how well you actually performed in the minigames. There are five different ranks you can receive based on those factors combined and each provides a different level of rewards. 

The best way to improve at the minigames is to just keep doing them, but that combined with the information from the other charts here should help you become a Curry Cooking Master by the time you become a Pokémon Master.

The size of each dish in the image you see once you’re finished cooking will also depend on the size of the Pokémon that are camping with you. The bigger the Pokémon, the bigger the dish.

And each individual Pokémon’s nature will affect how much they like the food and the EXP boost they get from it, too. A Pokémon that’s Modest Nature, for example, will like Dry but dislike Spicy.

As you fill out the Curry Dex, head over to the Camping King in the Wild Area and have him rate it every once in a while. He’ll give you some useful rewards, like ingredients and other goodies, as you complete more recipes.

And once you complete the Curry Dex, you’ll be rewarded with a golden set of cooking utensils that you can switch to. It has no effect on the meals, but it does look flashy.