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[DerSchlund]

Hi,

is there way to adjust my a stockpile so it will contain only biscuits, stew and roasts?

I tried to make a kitchen room, where all the ingredients are stored. The Idea was, that only the meals and drinks will be stored in the mainhall.

In the Stockpilequickstart guide for Dining Area Stockpiles is a suggestion to make a stockpile near the kitchen with "prepared maels" turnes off. But my cook uses prepared meat and fish for cooking. So my Dining room is full of uncooked (but prepared) fish, meat and drinks but i have little overview over the meals my cook has made.

Can someone explain to me, what the option "prepared meals" means exactly?

Greetings

[janamdo]

It are biscuit, stew and roast meals  made by a cook https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Cook

Let the cook make meals and store them near a storage room where the dwarves can eat the meals
I made in my earlier forts two storage rooms : one for prepared food and one for drinks adjecent to a dining room

Further you do need mugs for drinking and use a door for a corpse pile room ( miasma stench) 

[KevinM]

You'll want to edit the settings of the stock piles.  For the one near your kitchen, you still want meat and fish enabled (among other raw ingredients you want to use to cook) and disable prepared meals by pressing u.     Then for the one near your dining room, you want to first enable food (e) then block everything (b) and then you can re-enable prepared food (u) which will then only stockpile the biscuts, stew and roasts.

In a real life comparison: Prepared meals are considered things fully cooked, like what you would normally eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner.   Meat and Fish are just chunks of raw meat and raw fish.  Unprepared fish are freshly caught fish with things like scales, guts that need to be descaled, have their stomach and other organs removed, and perhaps even have the bones removed.   Unprepared meat is just a whole cow, or dead chicken with feathers still on it.  Meat (prepared for cooking) is things you'd find in a package ready to cook like a steak, or chicken breast (or thighs.  I prefer dark meat/ thighs and drumsticks personally) and while it's possible to eat these things raw, they often tend to be better cooked.

For food thoughts, it doesn't matter if it's cooked or raw (unless it cannot be eaten raw like quarry bush leaves).  If you don't have the desired ingredient cooked in a meal but have it sitting in your stockpile waiting to be cooked, then the dwarf will go after the raw food, desperate to eat a food they like.  Like desiring a filet mignon but only being able to eat ground beef (hamburgers and meatloaf).  Well, they get their hands on a filet mignon and even thought the cook hasn't been able to cook it yet, the dwarf will take it and eat it raw (maybe beef carpaccio) and still receive a content thought.  But if you have a masterfully prepared bacon wrapped filet mignon on a bed of fresh greens, the dwarf will go after this instead and be deligted instead of merely content.   Also, your dwarves who would rather have a plain steak won't want the filet, no matter how good it is.   So food gets a bit odd that way.

Make sure you use pots for both piles, otherwise food can rot / cause miasma and your cook will be unhappy (negative thoughts) for their well made food going to waste.

Except if you're playing vanilla and have to use various methods to get liquid ingredients to be added to the food (milk, alcohol and oils).  I've heard DFhack has some things that allow you to set up specific ingredents if you want to play chef (and that reminds me that I want to do that).

[DerSchlund]

Then for the one near your dining room, you want to first enable food (e) then block everything (b) and then you can re-enable prepared food (u) which will then only stockpile the biscuts, stew and roasts.

So... a fine cow meat biscuts will be stored in a stockpile that has pepared food enabled but "Meat" forbidden?

[PatrikLundell]

Yes. When converted into a meal it's no longer the ingredients (a wooden chair isn't a log anymore either, as a comparison).

You don't need containers in stockpiles to guard against rotting: the food stockpile itself does that. Containers are supposed to protect against vermin, though, although I've never seen any effect of that (I tend to get more food than what's consumed anyway just by keeping some variation going).

[KevinM]

Oops, forgot about that.  I keep my meals in pots because I don't have quantum stockpiling going, so it's the only way my dwarves move the cooked food to the stockpile.   I'd consider the vermin issue though, if there are some rareish ingredients that is hard to get.