Cooking Honey can be obtained from the resource node in Alejandro Farm west of Heidel. This is already covered at the top on the topic of nodes so I won’t go into detail. South of Calpheon with its own daily quest of 10 milk as well. This farm is just east of Calpheon with its own daily quest of 10 Milk. If you are unsure how to get your farm up and running I recommend reading this guide.
Otherwise you will need to farm corn, wheat, or sweet potato. You can pick either farm near Velia or even both if you need to increase your potato production. If you just need one node, I would pick Bartali since it has both potato and chicken meat resource nodes. You will need chicken meat if you want to make the Organic Feed for pets. Don’t forget to turn in Taken Out Food, a byproduct that might randomly produced everytime you cook anything. Every 5 of Taken out Food you will get Cooking EXP in exchange.
By producing or collecting the majority of ingredients yourself, you will save time, silver, and aggravation in haggling with merchants. The higher the quality, the fewer ingredients you have to use for a recipe. Generally speaking, if a recipe calls specialty drinks like a long island for three of an ingredient, one High-Quality ingredient will suffice. Similarly, one Top Quality ingredient can supplement five base quality ingredients. All available recipes show up in the cooking section to tell you what ingredients you need.
You can get ingredients by farming manually, collecting the yields from workers you send to various nodes, or you can buy items from cooking vendors. The first two methods are why you will want to build a solid foundational workforce and invest in complementary life skills such as fishing and farming. This means you will need to buy a residence in one of the regions, which warrants a bit of research. On the bright side, you only need to equip your home with the necessary cooking utensils, and you’ll be good to go. It would also be best if you devoted some time to building up the farming and fishing life skills to go hand in hand with cooking. There is an overwhelming plethora of recipes in Black Desert Online, which can aid in a wide array of areas from life skill boosts to HP regain and combat buffs or debuffs.
Cooking Honey is required to make both the precursor Tea with Fine Scent and the Milk Tea so you want to have a ton of them. You can purchase Smooth Milk Tea directly from a vendor named Maryan Pero in Calpheon. It costs 43k silver so it is much more expensive than crafting it. If you have the silvers and can’t be bothered just buy them from the vendor.