Secret recipes

[Frank_Stein]

Why not give kitchen it's own mini chemistry system.

A good way to do it would be spices.

herbs & Spices would be things grown by botany, extracted into spices (probably just reagents in a special container), and when added to food make it better or worse.

Maybe specific recipes would need spices to be made, like a specific style of cheeseburger. You would also need exact measurements otherwise you ruin the food.

Salt would actually have a use, since you could marginally improve the "taste" of bad food by adding salt to raise quality a tiny bit.

Yes. This would be excellent. There was talk of having food play a larger impact on the station, with a possible favorite foods thing where each player would have a certain dish they preferred with eating it giving some bonuses. Spices, sauces, and other condiments would help a lot with this, as you could have crewman share a food item as their preferred meal, but maybe have one person prefer more salt than another, or someone else like more spice. Plus, I'm sure there will be some exotic spices with unique effects to the foods they are added to.