A Guide to Dish Strength in Pokémon Sleep

Dish strength determines how much a meal contributes to Snorlax's weekly strength and how much experience your recipes earn. This guide walks through every layer of the calculation — ingredient values, recipe bonuses, recipe levels, and final multipliers — so you understand exactly where your numbers come from and what you can do to make them bigger.

Ingredient strength values

Every ingredient in Pokémon Sleep has a strength value, just like every berry does. The difference is that Snorlax can only benefit from an ingredient's strength when it's used in a meal.

For example, a Bean Sausage has a strength value of 103. You might have seen this number floating above the pot when you cook — that's the strength of any extra ingredients being added to the dish.

If you make a dish with one Bean Sausage, it contributes 103 strength. Two gives you 206. Three gives you 309. The math starts simple: just multiply the ingredient value by the count.

Here's the good news: everything that changes this number from here only makes things better. You can't make it worse.

The recipe bonus

Let's follow our Bean Sausage example up through seven. On a salad or dessert week, seven Bean Sausages would give you 721 strength (103 × 7). But on a curry week, seven Bean Sausages suddenly become worth 856 strength.

Where did that extra 135 strength come from? You made a recipe. Seven Bean Sausages is Bean Burger Curry, and the game gives you bonus strength for completing a recipe. We call this the recipe bonus.

If we divide 135 by 7, we get roughly 19 — meaning each Bean Sausage was effectively worth 103 + 19 = 122 instead of just 103. That works out to about 19% more. So the recipe bonus on Bean Burger Curry is 19%.

The recipe bonus is a hidden value. The game doesn't display it, but you can figure it out by reverse-engineering the final dish strength — or just look it up, since others have already done the math.

Recipe bonus tiers

There are seven levels of recipe bonus across all the recipes in the game:

These values are set for every ingredient, and the recipe bonus is fixed for every dish. That means each recipe has a set minimum starting strength that you can't change — it's determined by the recipe's ingredients multiplied by the recipe's bonus percentage.

Generally speaking, recipes that require more ingredients tend to have higher recipe bonuses. The game rewards bigger, more complex meals.

Extra ingredients

Ingredients that are not part of the recipe don't benefit from the recipe bonus. If you add an eighth Bean Sausage to your Bean Burger Curry, that extra sausage only contributes its base 103 strength — not the boosted 122.

These extra ingredients are the ones you see floating above the pot when you cook. Their strength values are added on top of the recipe's strength, but without the bonus. We'll come back to exactly where they fit in the final calculation.

Mixed dishes

A dish that doesn't match any recipe is called a mixed dish — Mixed Curry, Mixed Salad, or Mixed Juice. With a mixed dish, the strength is simply the total of the ingredient values in the pot. No recipe, no recipe bonus.

Think of it like this: Neroli is in the lab testing ingredient combinations that create extra Snorlax strength. When you match a recipe, you get the benefit of that research. When you don't, you just get the raw ingredients.

Base strength

The base strength of a dish is the recipe's ingredient values multiplied by the recipe bonus percentage. This is the starting point before any other bonuses.

You might think the number in the little orange box next to the recipe in the menu is the base strength. It's actually higher — it's the recipe strength, which combines the base strength with the recipe's level bonus.

Recipe level bonus

Every recipe has a level that goes up the more you cook it. Each level adds additional bonus strength on top of the base strength.

The number you see in the recipe list menu is the recipe strength — the base strength plus the level bonus. Technically you never see the raw base strength in the game, because the very first time you cook any dish it levels up. So you only ever see the recipe strength.

Recipe levels are permanent progress. Once a recipe gains a level, it stays there forever and benefits every future cook of that dish.

The amount of experience a recipe earns each time you cook it comes from the total dish strength (which we'll get to next). Higher dish strength means faster recipe leveling — another reason to push for bigger meals.

The Sandshrew-Persian method

It's probably not worth memorizing the exact level bonus values, but here's a trick for having a general sense of what the bonus is at any given level.

You just have to remember two numbers: 27 and 53. We call this the Sandshrew-Persian method (Sandshrew is #27, Persian is #53 in the Pokédex).

So between levels 27 and 53, the added bonus is roughly 2–3× the level number. Below level 27, the bonus is less than 2×. Above level 53, the bonus is more than 3×.

This gives you a quick mental estimate without needing to look up a chart every time.

Total dish strength

The dish strength is the final number that shows up when you actually cook the meal. This is what gets added directly to Snorlax's weekly strength and what counts as experience for the recipe's level.

To get there, we take the recipe strength, add the strength of any extra ingredients, and then apply up to three multipliers:

• Area bonus (guaranteed). If your area bonus is 5%, the strength is multiplied by 1.05×. If it's 60%, you get 1.60×. This applies to every meal you cook on that island that week.
• Extra Tasty (chance-based). The game randomly decides if your dish is regular or Extra Tasty. Regular means no extra bonus. Extra Tasty is 2× on most days and 3× on Sunday. No tapping pattern or ingredient arrangement will affect the odds — only the Extra Tasty Chance subskill can increase them.
• Event bonus (sometimes). During certain events, the game applies an additional multiplier to all dish strength. When these are active, it's a great time to cook your best recipes.

What you can influence

Of all these layers, the number you have the most control over is your area bonus. If you want to level up your recipes faster and get more overall strength from your dishes, the best strategy is to cook wherever you have the highest area bonus.

Higher area bonus means higher dish strength, which means more experience for your recipe levels, which means even higher recipe strength next time. It compounds.

Recipe levels are permanent, so grinding dishes on a high-area-bonus island is an investment that pays off for every future cook of that recipe — no matter which island you're on later.

Professor NewRolly says: dish strength is layers. Ingredients → recipe bonus → level bonus → area bonus → luck. You control most of those layers, and none of them can make things worse. Cook big, cook often, and the numbers take care of themselves.

Next: How big dishes work (200k+) · Ingredients · How to reach Master 20 · Glossary

Part of Cooking & dishes