The Kitchen Storm / Cooking Update for Grow a Garden added a stack of new pets that change how you farm, cook, and grind. Some pets boost cooking and egg hatching, others create XP or variant hotspots, and a couple are straight-up rare. This guide lists every new pet from the update (Gorilla Chef, Sunny-Side Chicken, Bacon Pig, Hotdog Daschund, Lobster Thermidor, and more), explains their abilities, and shows the easiest ways to get and use them.
What’s new in this update
- New cooking-focused pets that affect crafting and duplication.
- Event NPC interactions (Rat Connoisseur) and limited Culinarian Chests that drop pets and seeds.
- Pets with passive auras that boost variant growth, egg hatch speed, XP gain, and cooking duplication.
- New high-rarity hunting targets (legendary pets have very low drop rates).
All New pets & ability explanations
1. Gorilla Chef (legendary)
- Traits: Helping Hands; King Cook.
- Helping Hands: When crafting, each material has a chance to not be consumed — saves resources over time.
- King Cook: If a Cooking Pot or Cooking Cauldron is in your garden, Gorilla Chef cooks in it and gives a 5–10% chance to duplicate food on each cook.
- Hunger: 55,000 (long uptime).
- Why it matters: Best pet if your focus is cooking and recipe farming — duplication both saves ingredients and doubles output.
- How to use: Place in garden near pot/cauldron; run mass cooks during events to stack duplicated outputs.
2. Sunny-Side Chicken
- Passive: Better Eggcelerator — >20% faster egg hatching.
- Hunger: 3,400 (low upkeep).
- Why it matters: Speeds egg collection and pet acquisition. Great for players who breed or hatch a lot.
- How to use: Keep active when incubators/eggs are running to shorten timers. Best paired with any hatch-speed boosts.
3. Bacon Pig
- Passive: Bacon Frenzy — periodically emits an aura that greatly increases chance nearby fruit grow as variants.
- Hunger: 5,000.
- Why it matters: Variant farming and getting special variant fruits become much easier. Use when you want rare crops or mutated foods.
- How to use: Place near crop beds to maximize variant conversion radius while farming mutated dishes.
4. Hotdog Daschund
- Passive: Loaded Dog — every ~80–240s drops mustard or ketchup puddles for 30–45s. Pets on mustard: 20–40% faster cooldowns. Pets on ketchup: 20–40% more XP.
- Hunger: 16,000.
- Why it matters: Useful for targeted XP runs or boosting pet ability cooldowns during intensive farming.
- How to use: Drop the dog near pets you want to level fast (ketchup) or near cooking/crafting pets you rely on frequently (mustard).
5. Lobster Thermidor
- Passives: Molten Boiling Point — every 300–900s a ~20%+ chance nearby fruit becomes Molten. Meteoric Boiling Point — every 500–1800s a ~10%+ chance nearby fruit becomes Meteoric.
- Hunger: ~50,505 (very high).
- Why it matters: Converts nearby fruits into special states that often have extra effects; excellent for endgame farms that want high-impact variants.
- How to use: Put near orchards/fruit beds to passively create special fruits over long sessions.
How to obtain each pet (event methods & rates)
- Gorilla Chef — unlocked via a quest in the second part of the Cooking Update (event questline). Very limited; treat as a quest reward rather than a chest drop.
- Sunny-Side Chicken — obtainable from the Rat Connoisseur (taste testing mutated food); reported chance around 30% per successful trade.
- Bacon Pig — can drop from Culinarian Chests (common-ish pet roll; reported ~34.5%).
- Hotdog Daschund — drops from Culinarian Chest / related event containers (reported ~14.5%).
- Lobster Thermidor — very rare; appears in the event chest / Rat Connoisseur reward pool (reported ~1%).
- Other event pets / rewards — many are tied to Culinarian Chests, Exotic chest variants, Rat Connoisseur exchanges, or specific event quests. Expect most high-value pets to be event-locked and low-drop-rate.
Important: these pets are event or chest tied. If your server doesn’t currently host the Cooking Event, you likely can’t get them until the next event window.
Best usage tips & team setups
- Cooking / Recipe farmers: Gorilla Chef + any cooking-duplication tools + Cooking Pot/Cauldron. Keep Helping Hands active to reduce ingredient cost.
- Egg/collection focused: Sunny-Side Chicken + incubator boosts → hatch more pets faster.
- Variant/rare crop chasers: Bacon Pig + farm layout that clusters beds inside the aura radius.
- XP grinders: Hotdog Daschund + starfish / blood owl stacks on ketchup puddles for fast pet leveling.
- Long-run special fruit farming: Lobster Thermidor in big orchards — leave it running to generate Meteoric/Molten fruits passively.
- Swap quickly between builds: Use Pet Save Slots (pet slots) to swap whole setups (XP / variant / cooking) instantly without re-deploying pets manually.
The Kitchen Storm update in Grow a Garden added pets that genuinely change playstyle — cooking duplication, faster hatching, variant farming, and more. If you focus on cooking, hunt the Gorilla Chef quest and run mass cooks. If you want faster pet collection, farm for Sunny-Side Chicken via the Rat Connoisseur.
For everyone else, test different combos (Bacon Pig + Lobster + Hotdog) and use pet slots to switch builds quickly. Want a one-page printable checklist of which pets to target by playstyle (cooking / XP / variants)? I can make that next.