Most food items in Skyrim feel largely interchangeable, but garlic bread easily stands as the most valuable of them all. While most food items tend to be rather pointless outside of Survival Mode, garlic bread is excellent to have even in normal playthroughs. Almost any sort of player can benefit from keeping a few loaves handy for any situation.
In Skyrim, food items tend to only be used in Survival Mode, where they can sate the Dragonborn's hunger. In normal play, their incredibly low healing ability makes them virtually useless in most situations. Potions that greatly outstrip food's healing potential are available from the very beginning of the game, especially since alchemy is very strong in Skyrim. Most of the time, produce in Skyrim sees more use being sold to farmers for gold and friendship than actually eaten. However, garlic bread bucks the trend of Skyrim's food being useless in a major way.
Garlic bread heals 1 point of damage when eaten, putting it on the level of most uncooked food items. However, it has a second effect that puts it far above every other food item in the game. Garlic bread in Skyrim will cure any diseases that the Dragonborn is currently suffering from, and is one of the few methods available in the game to do so. Thanks to this bonus effect, garlic bread becomes very valuable despite its low monetary value. Essentially, it is a cure disease potion that can be cooked rather than brewed through alchemy, making it easily one of Skyrim's best cooking recipes available.
Garlic Bread Is Skyrim's Most Useful Cooking Recipe
The other main methods to cure diseases are through a cure disease potion, or using a shrine. The potion is just as useful as garlic bread, but it must either be bought for a fair amount of gold, or brewed with some fairly rare ingredients. Meanwhile, shrines will cure all diseases for free, but they can require stopping a quest in the middle and going out of one's way to visit the shrine. On the other hand, garlic bread can be made with bread, garlic, and butter at any cooking spit. Bread and Garlic can be bought easily, and while butter is fairly rare in Skyrim, a player with a home can collect it regularly from a butter churn. In addition, the player receives two pieces of garlic bread every time they cook it, furthering the convenience.
Although garlic bread being able to cure disease sounds random, there is actually a solid base for this in the game's mechanics. In Skyrim, vampirism is counted as one of the game's many diseases. In folklore, garlic has long been considered repellent to vampires. With vampirism being a disease in Skyrim, it makes sense for garlic to have disease-curing properties. In fact, one could argue that garlic is one of the best alchemical ingredients in Skyrim, able to bolster every status bar and offer resistance to poison. Although strangely, garlic does not cure diseases when used in alchemy, only when used to make garlic bread.
Garlic bread may only have a single perk compared to other foods, but it's enough to make it a standout. A cheap, easy way to cure disease can be an absolute lifesaver, especially with so few other ways to do so in-game. In Skyrim, there's no questioning that garlic bread is the greatest food one can find.
