Finding a good food source can make or break your progress, no matter how early or advanced you are in your Minecraft world. Whether you are just trying to survive the first night or on your way to beat the dragon, the one thing you should always have is a good food source. So in this post, I will show you the best food in Minecraft.
Before we move on, if you’re just for the bottom line, click here to find the best food without scrolling through the entire list. But you may miss some cool pieces of information that way.
To determine what is the best food, I’ll use four metrics:
- How easy it is to get or craft on a large scale
- Ease of use and keep in the inventory
- How many hunger points it restores
- How much saturation it restores
What’s the Difference between Hunger and Saturation?
The difference between hunger and saturation is that saturation controls how long it will take your hunger level to drop, and hunger is the actual level that controls health regeneration. I
f the hunger bar goes below 6 (3 meat sticks), you won’t be able to spring or swim. If it reaches 0 you’ll start to starve.
Hunger and saturation go hand in hand and are equally important when searching for the best food source in Minecraft.
What Makes a Good Food Source in Minecraft?
As I mentioned earlier, when trying to find Minecraft’s best food, I looked into four aspects: How easy it is to get, how easy it is to store in the inventory and hotbar, how much hunger, and how much saturation it restores.
I ranked each on a scale of 1 to 5 and got their combined score.
Best Food in Minecraft
#11: Cake
The cake is a unique food in Minecraft because it acts as a decoration block, too. To eat it, you need to place it on the ground and left-click it. This means you can’t use it in boats, while gliding with an elytra, or trying to escape a herd of zombies.
When you eat it whole, It restores 14 hunger levels (7 meat sticks) which is the most in the entire game, but only 2.8 saturation, which is very low compared to other foods.
To craft a cake, you’ll need three buckets of milk, three wheats, two sugar, and an egg. Not the most challenging recipe, but not that easy to craft at a large scale, either.
Without a doubt, the cake is not Minecraft’s best food source. In fact, it’s not even the best cake-like food in the game.
Cake – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 2.5/5
#10: Pumpkin Pie
A pumpkin pie retrieves 8 hunger points (4 meat sticks) and 4.8 saturation points. It’s made of a pumpkin, sugar, and an egg, making it difficult to acquire enough of it early game.
An apprentice-level farmer villager has a 67% chance to sell you four pumpkin pies for an emerald. So it becomes a better option if you have already reached the stage where you cured some zombie villagers and got enough emeralds.
Pumpkin Pie – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 3/5
#9: Baked Potatoes
Baked potatoes are a decent food source. Each will restore 5 hunger and 6 saturation points. It’s less than the pumpkin pie, but a baked potato is a lot simpler to get and similar to bread in hunger and saturation (ranked one place higher).
To make a baked potato, just take a potato and put it in a furnace. You can bake eight potatoes with a single piece of coal, and they stack up to 64.
Jacksepticeye ate baked potatoes exclusively in his survival series, so it can surely sustain you, too.
Baked Potatoes – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 3/5
#8: Bread
Bread is a food you can get in the first few minutes of your survival world if you spawned near a village. Each is crafted from 3 wheats. You can also find it in village chests or turn hay bales into wheat, and wheat into bread, effectively turning every hay bale into 3 breads.
It’s not the best food in Minecraft, but it’s one of the best foods in your first couple of days. Every bread fills five hunger points and six saturation points.
Bread – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 3/5
#7: Mushroom Stew
The mushroom stew signifies our transformation from decent food to good food. Even though it’s non-stackable and requires both types of mushrooms and a bowl to craft, it’s still better than most foods in the game.
You can also get mushroom stew by using a bowl on a mooshroom cow, which is a major convenience upgrade if you find a mushroom island biome.
Mushroom stew fills six hunger points (3 meat sticks) and 7.2 saturation points.
Mushroom Stew – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 3.5/5
#6: Cooked Salmon
My personal favorite starter food. It’s so common that it could be a real challenge not to see any salmon in your first few minutes of gameplay ( hint: look in rivers, not oceans). And to top it off, you can one-shot a salmon even with wooden tools.
A cooked salmon will restore six hunger and 9.6 saturation points. This is not amazing, but for the stage in the game Salmon is usually used at, this is great.
Cooked Salmon – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 3.5/5
#5: Suspicious Stew (Saturation)
To craft a suspicious stew, you’ll need a bowl, both types of mushrooms, and blue orchid or dandelion flowers. An alternative way of getting it is to feed a mooshroom cow a blue orchid or dandelion and then use a bowl on it.
Suspicious stew fills 13 hunger points, and the additional applied saturation effect (that brings the total saturation points to 21.2) will allow you to regenerate health even if your hunger bar isn’t full.
This is not enough to make it the best food source in Minecraft, but it sure is enough to take a non-stackable food item which is a pain to craft, all the way to the 5th place.
Suspicious Stew – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 4/5
#4: Steak
Steak is undoubtedly the most popular food in Minecraft. It’s the best combination of being very efficient (8 hunger and 12.8 saturation points) and easy to get. It’s so common that you are most likely to start farming it even before your first night.
Every cow you kill will drop 1-3 raw beef, which you’ll need to cook unless you killed the cow with a fire aspect sword or if it died while on fire. A sword with Looting III and Sweeping Edge III will play a big role in acquiring big amounts of it, so you probably want to grind a bit for these.
Steak – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 4.5/5
#3: Cooked Porkchop
In a way, cooked porkchops are the less popular alternative to steak. They are identical in hunger and saturation (8 and 12.8, respectively), are equally easy to get, and both require cooking.
What makes the cooked porkchop one place closer to being the best food source in Minecraft than its beefy friend, you ask? The fact that you can actually get it in the nether, in addition to the overworld, by killing hoglins.
Cooked Porkchop – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 4.5/5
#2: Golden Apple
Just as the mushroom stew marked the change from decent to good food, the golden apple signifies the transition to superfood.
You probably ask yourself how did I forget about the enchanted golden apple, and for that, I say I haven’t. It just didn’t make the cut. There’s no way you can live on enchanted golden apples because you can’t get them at the rate you need to eat them.
Now, with that out of the way, back to the subject. You can craft a golden apple with an apple and eight gold ingots, making it not as easy to get as other food sources. Once you craft or find one in a chest, they are as good as food can be. But as good as golden apples are, they are better used for curing zombie villagers, in my opinion.
Each of these bad boys will restore two meat sticks (4 hunger points) and 9.6 saturation. It may not sound a lot, but in addition to these, you get the regeneration II effect for 5 seconds and absorption for two minutes. These status effects refill 4 health points and add 2 full hearts to the healthbar.
Golden Apple – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 4.5/5
#1: Golden Carrot – The Best Food in Minecraft
On paper, the golden carrot may seem like the bad version of the golden apple, but that’s not true. Although the golden carrot only fills 3 meat sticks (6 hunger points), it fills 14.4 saturation points, allowing you to regenerate tons of health and eat a lot less than you would if you ate a steak or a porkchop.
It’s stackable and easy to get, costing less than a carrot and a gold ingot, and you have a 50% chance to get 3 of them from a master farmer villager or three golden carrots for one emerald from a cured villager.
This is undoubtedly an end game food source, but since it’s so easy to get on a large scale, doesn’t require cooking, is pretty cheap, and is stackable, it beats any other food, making it the unbeatable best food in Minecraft.
Golden Carrot – Final Score
- Easy to Acquire – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Easy to Use – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Hunger Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Saturation Points – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final Score: 5/5
Finishing Thoughts
Today we went through the top candidates for being the best food in Minecraft. We looked into each’s pros and cons and eventually found the best food source in the game.
Do you agree with it? What do you think? Post your thought in the comments.