Guide to Gourmet Ranch for Facebook: tips, tricks, cheats, hints and strategies

Gourmet Ranch is a new Facebook game that has become a hit due to its unique method of gameplay, which combines the mechanics of both a farming game such as Farmville or Farmandia, and a restaurant game such as Cafe World, to create a game where you grow crops, harvest them, use them to make recipes, cook those dishes, and then serve them to your customers.

The combination of gameplay provides lots of complexity that you wouldn't otherwise be able to find in your typical farming or restaurant games - for example, each recipe that you can cook can take as few as one ingredient or as many as five ingredients, and you find these ingredients by either farming and growing them yourself (which is the most profitable way to do it) or by buying them from your neighbors (which is the fastest way to do it).

Want to figure out the most profitable and fastest ways to become a master farmer and restaurateur? Read on...

An excellent way to make big money in very little time is to first, add many many neighbors in Gourmet Ranch. Adding people who are high-level players is the best way, because they can cook up the most expensive recipes. Next, keep checking back for dishes that they put up for sale, and buy them, and serve them in your own restaurant. This enables you to make lots of money even without having the ability to grow certain plants or farm certain animals (I.E. you are at too low a level and have yet to unlock certain crops).

One thing that really helps in the game, especially when you get time-crunched, is the fact that your recipes never go bad and your crops never wilt. This means that no matter how long it takes to actually cook or grow something, or to have your animals ready for use in recipes, you will never have to worry about setting your schedule around harvesting or cooking or serving, so that you can come back to the game and play it any time you want to. The worst that happens if you forget to serve your food is that you lose popularity, but you gain it back as soon as you serve your food.

To get ideas on what recipes you should cook, click on your recipe book and click on all of the different recipe categories (beginning, intermediate, master, etc) and figure out what you already have, and what you are currently able to grow. Use this to figure out what order you should grow things in next, in order to always have a good supply of high-coin recipes available for your restaurant to serve.

To increase your popularity rapidly, you need more than just the four tables and chairs that you start with. Build the cheapest tables and chairs (the only thing you pay for with the more expensive ones, is the style and color) and fill your entire floor with them. You can fit up to 18 sets of tables and chairs into your restaurant without expanding, and once you expand once, you will be able to fit far more into your restaurant, and cause your popularity to shoot up.

In addition to causing your popularity to increase, having more tables and chairs enables your cooked food to be served faster and consumed faster, thus enabling you to make money more quickly and push your food out more quickly.

Take advantage of your fruit trees. You can fit many of them into your farm (you can fit 4 of them into the same plot of land that you can only fit 1 plowed square or 1 fenced-off portion of land in). You start off with an apple tree and a cherry tree, so move them all into one square if you want to make room to fit more plowed land into your farm. Better yet, simply load your farm up with apple and cherry trees, because they provide massive amounts of goods per tree planted (an apple tree can be harvested once per day up to 14 times total) and even though they are more expensive than your standard crops, they are cheaper per harvest, AND they give you much more expensive food to serve, so that you make more money for less money spent.

Don't neglect your animal pens, either. It's easy to forget about them, but having chickens and pigs on hand early on gives you acess to much more expensive recipes than you would have otherwise (and recipes that can be mixed with your other goods).

That's all for now! More tips? Post them as comments!