The Sims 4 Home Chef Hustle Stuff Pack adds two main elements: new small kitchen appliances and a food stall to sell food from. This pack also comes with two brand-new aspirations centered around this new gameplay. In this guide, we’ll look at one of them: Appliance Wiz. This aspiration gets your Sims busy using the new small appliances. The other aspiration, Market Magnate, is focused on the food stall. In my opinion, it’s best to start with Appliance Wiz because you’ll build up your Sim’s Cooking Skill, learn your way around the new appliances, and the tasks done in Appliance Wiz will help prepare for Market Magnate and make those tasks much easier to complete. Also, Appliance Wiz is easier to complete than Market Magnate.
Some of the tasks listed in the Appliance Wiz aspiration might make you scratch your head in confusion, but this guide aims to walk you through each stage and get you from start to finish.
Make sure to read our review of The Sims 4 Home Chef Hustle Stuff Pack, released in September 2023 for PC and Mac via Steam and EA App, PlayStation 4 | 5, Xbox One & Xbox Series X | S, and Epic Games Store.
For more aspirations guides for The Sims 4, see our Goal Oriented Teen Aspiration Guide and Championship Rider Aspiration Guide.
Appliance Wiz Milestone 1: Chop Chopper
Like any aspiration in The Sims 4, you start at the bottom. The first two tasks gets you started and sets the tone for the aspiration.
Before you start working on any tasks, it is recommended that you buy the following items: the stand mixer, pizza oven, and waffle maker.
The stand mixer, waffle maker, and pizza oven are a must if you want to complete the Appliance Wiz aspiration.
Task 1: Collect Prepped Ingredients 5 Times While Inspired
Before you start this task, you should skip to Task 2 and buy yourself a stand mixer. You’ll need it for this task and future tasks in the Appliance Wiz aspiration, and it will fulfil Task 2.
Once you have a stand mixer, it’s time to make some Prepped Ingredients. However, it’s not that straightforward completing this task. First, your Sim must be in the Inspired mood.
There are lots of ways to get your Sim Inspired. They can drink an Inspired Mood potion if they have any satisfaction points going spare. They can Browse Art on the computer, or view any artwork. They can also complete some creative tasks such as painting or cooking. Whichever works for you, get your Sim Inspired and then send them to the stand mixer and get making those 5 Prepped Ingredients. It’s best to make all 5 Prepped Ingredients in one go as soon as your Sim becomes Inspired, while the mood lasts.
Making the Prepped Ingredients is easy enough. For this task, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have any fresh ingredients on you, or if your Sim has low Cooking Skill and their Prepped Ingredients options are limited. The main thing is the Inspired Mood.
Note the specific directions of this task: Collect Prepped Ingredients 5 Times While Inspired. The key word here is Collect, not Make. Whenever a Prepped Ingredient has finished mixing in the stand mixer, your Sim must collect it manually. Your Sim won’t pick it up automatically. Look out for the green light on the mixer to see if it’s ready for collection. Your Sim will then transfer the Prepped Ingredient into their inventory. It won’t automatically go in the refrigerator. This rule also applies to the waffle maker and pizza oven, whenever you take out the finished product. Make sure to stow it in the refrigerator to keep it fresh.
Here’s the final summary of this task: make 5 of any Prepped Ingredients, and then make sure that when your Sim goes to Collect them, they are Inspired.
Make sure your Sim is in the Inspired Mood when making the 5 Prepped Ingredients for this task.
Task 2: Own 1 Small Kitchen Appliance
To be honest, this task should really be listed first, and you should do it first as well. It’s logical to buy a small kitchen appliance before you even start this aspiration. Any small kitchen appliance will do, but your top pick should be the stand mixer. You’ll be using this a lot throughout the aspiration tasks, as the stand mixer is used to make Prepped Ingredients. The other kitchen appliances include the new pizza oven and waffle maker, but base game items such as the microwave, tea maker, and coffee machine. If you have Cool Kitchen Stuff, the ice cream maker counts as well, as does the popcorn maker from Movie Hangout Stuff.
The small kitchen appliances can be found under the Kitchen Appliances category in Buy Mode.
Appliance Wiz Milestone 2: Slicer and Dicer
You’re now underway with becoming a master of your small kitchen appliances in The Sims 4. Time for the next stage!
When making Prepped Ingredients with fresh ingredients or dishes with Prepped Ingredients, make sure that Use Prepped Ingredients and Use Fresh Ingredients are checked. They should be automatically checked, but just make sure they are when you go ahead to cook something.
Task 1: Experience Sped Up Cooking 5 Times
I’ll admit, at first I found the description of this task a little confusing. I initially thought it meant to upgrade the stand mixer, pizza oven and waffle maker so that cooking time would be sped up to fulfil this task. As it turned out, I’d misunderstood. What this task actually requires you to do is cook dishes using Prepped Ingredients 5 times. Using Prepped Ingredients in your recipes speeds up cooking time. You should have some Prepped Ingredients left over from the aspiration’s first level task. If you don’t, mix up some more – any you like – and simply cook 5 dishes with any Prepped Ingredients. They don’t have to be different recipes each time; you can do the same one 5 times, so long as you have the Prepped Ingredients.
When selecting a dish to cook, hover over the options. New information will pop up, including informing you if cooking time will be reduced. If you see a dish that states this, cook this to fulfil the task requirements.
Using Prepped Ingredients reduces the cooking time for a dish.
Task 2: Collect 3 Prepped Ingredients That Were Made Using Fresh Ingredients
This task is pretty straightforward. It requires use of the stand mixer, plus some fresh ingredients. This is any fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, or other ingredients on your Sim. They’ll add these to the chosen recipe, which deducts the cost of making it. You can buy fresh ingredients from stalls around the world, by ordering groceries via the refrigerator or phone, or you can harvest plants or go fishing to get free fresh ingredients.
To complete this task, gather plenty of fresh ingredients, then open up the Prepped Ingredients menu via the stand mixer to see which ones you can make using fresh ingredients. Prepped Ingredients that can be made with fresh ingredients will have the fresh ingredients highlighted in red, while unavailable fresh ingredients will be greyed out. Select any available Prepped Ingredients that can be made with fresh ingredients and do this 3 times. The Prepped Ingredients must be collected from the stand mixer once they are ready to complete the task.
You can check if you have the required fresh ingredients for the Prepped Ingredients.
Appliance Wiz Milestone 3: Flavor Fusionist
From Milestone 3, not only will you have an extra task to do, but the tasks will get a little harder. They won’t be impossible, but they might require more work to complete.
Task 1: Collect 1 Excellent Prepped Ingredient
An Excellent level Prepped Ingredient is the highest quality you can get (the others being Normal and Poor), and the ideal quality if you want good value and good tasting food. You might think the quality of food you make is random or just luck, but there is a way to increase your chances of better quality food. First off, the higher your Cooking Skill, the greater the chance your creation will be of high quality. The chances are even higher with recipes of lower Cooking Skill. It’s much easier to make a high quality Cooking Level 1 dish than a Cooking Level 10 dish. High quality fresh ingredients can also really boost a dish’s overall quality, so add them in.
With all this in mind, create any Prepped Ingredient you like with the stand mixer. While a Prepped Ingredient is being made, you can hover the cursor over the stand mixer to see some information, including the preparation time left, but also the quality of the Prepped Ingredient. This particular information is highlighted in purple text. If the Prepped Ingredient is of Excellent quality when you collect it from the mixer, you’ll fulfil this task.
Even during prep time, you can see what quality a Prepped Ingredient is going to be before it’s even ready.
Task 2: Cook 5 Times While Listening to Music
This task isn’t too taxing. You just need to cook something 5 times while listening to some in-game music.
First, get a stereo or some kind of music player in your Sim’s kitchen. Then, set any radio station of your choosing playing. To complete this task, you must do it correctly. First, before you start cooking, have your Sim Listen to the music on the stereo. Just having the stereo on won’t do. You need to make your Sim listen to the music by interacting with the stereo. Once you’ve done this, make them cook something – anything. The Sims 4 is great at having your Sims multi-task, so they can get cooking while still listening to music!
Get them to cook something 5 times while the Listen to Music interaction is active to complete this task.
Make sure your Sim is actively listening to music when cooking. Just having the stereo on in the room isn’t enough to meet the requirements of this task.
Task 3: Cook Meals While Using 6 Unique Prepped Ingredients
This task isn’t necessarily hard, just needing a bit of work to complete. The good news is that you don’t need to use all 6 Prepped Ingredients in one meal. The goal is to use 6 different Prepped Ingredients that you’ve made in your dishes, but not necessarily together.
To do this task, you should keep track of how many different Prepped Ingredients you’ve made. Six is quite a number, so make sure you don’t make the same Prepped Ingredient more than once, and make sure you have six totally different ones. It doesn’t matter if you use fresh ingredients to make them or not. By this stage, you should ideally have a higher Cooking Skill, meaning you have more options for what Prepped Ingredients to make. When you first start working on this task, if you have at least 6 Prepped Ingredients to choose for making, just go down the list so you have all of them. Once you’ve got them all, use them in any dishes you like. It doesn’t matter what you make, so long as all 6 Prepped Ingredients are used.
As an extra note, once you’ve got your Prepped Ingredient ready, store it in the refrigerator. If you leave it in your inventory, it’ll go off quicker. With this in mind, it’s best to use the Prepped Ingredients to cook with as soon as you have them. Otherwise, they’ll spoil and you’ll have to make some fresh.
The task will keep track of how many different Prepped Ingredients you’ve used so far.
Appliance Wiz Milestone 4: Mixing Maestro
This is the final stage in the Appliance Wiz aspiration. As it is the last step to completing the aspiration, these tasks will test you, particularly Tasks 1 and 3.
Task 1: Make Pleasantly Unpleasant Waffles
This is probably the most difficult task to complete of all the tasks in the Appliance Wiz aspiration. It’s not insanely hard, just taking some time and work to do. For a start, you need Level 10 Cooking Skill before you can even make Pleasantly Unpleasant Waffles. The best way to improve your Sim’s Cooking Skill is by actually doing it. Just cook, cook, cook, and do some more cooking. During breaks, get your Sim to watch the Cooking Channel on TV. Reading Cooking Skill books never hurts either.
Aside from maxing your Cooking Skill, there are certain ingredients that you need to make this dish. For the Pleasantly Unpleasant Waffles, you must provide all the ingredients yourself. You can’t cook without them. It’s nothing too demanding, just one helping of batter, one strawberry, and one trash fruit. Batter is made with the stand mixer. Strawberries you can find and harvest in the world, or purchase with grocery shopping or from fresh ingredient stalls. Trash fruit is a little trickier to obtain. Trash fruit grows on a plant that appears when you leave garbage outside. Find a pile of garbage and leave it somewhere outside on your Sim’s lot. Leave it a while and eventually a plant will appear. Wait a bit longer until you can harvest it and collect your trash fruit.
With the three ingredients acquired, and your Sim’s Cooking Skill at max, simply whip up some Pleasantly Unpleasant Waffles and you’re done!
Leave a pile of trash lying around outside and eventually a plant will grow next to it.
Task 2: Make a Prepped Ingredient Using a Stand Mixer With At Least One Upgrade
This is by far the easiest of the 3 final tasks for the Appliance Wiz aspiration. All you have to do is make a Prepped Ingredient with the stand mixer with at least one upgrade.
In order to upgrade your stand mixer, you need a minimum Handiness Skill of level 4. Even then, only one upgrade is available to you: Speedy Mix. This speeds up the amount of time it takes for the Prepped Ingredient to be ready, so it’s worth doing this upgrade. The other two upgrades are Add Self Cleaning and Add Unbreakable, but you’ll need a higher Handiness Skill level to unlock these upgrades. Once your stand mixer is upgraded with at least one upgrade, make any Prepped Ingredient you like and you’ll have completed this task.
Each of the three new appliances comes with 3 handy upgrades.
Task 3: Cook 2 Pizzas or Waffles At a Single Goaled Event After Reaching Silver
This task isn’t actually that hard. It just requires a bit of organizing. First, make sure you have a waffle maker or pizza oven at the ready. Then, start up any goaled event. For this task, I would suggest hosting a House Party.
Complete any tasks necessary in the goaled event to get to silver. It’s recommended that you get on with this as soon as the event begins, since you need the time to make the pizzas or waffles. Having the waffle maker or pizza oven with the sped up cooking upgrade really helps save precious minutes. As soon as it hits silver, head to your pizza oven or waffle maker and make two pizzas or waffles. Make sure you do this while the event is ongoing, otherwise it won’t count.
There are some things to watch out for when completing this task, at least that I’ve noticed. When a social event first starts, the level starts at bronze. Don’t be fooled if the meter is showing gold at the beginning. It’s not at gold level unless you complete the tasks. When the event reaches silver, a silver medal will be displayed in the center bar of the meter. As soon as the event is underway, get the tasks fulfilled to fill up the meter. The event won’t last forever, so be quick as you can.
There’s something else to be careful of. I tried completing this task by having a birthday party for one of my Sims in the household. This wasn’t the Sim with the Appliance Wiz aspiration, but another Sim in the same household. For whatever reason, when I made two pizzas, they didn’t count towards the task. This might be because of the nature of the event, that my aspiration Sim wasn’t celebrating their birthday, so the event didn’t count them. I don’t know. However, the next day, I hosted a simple House Party, and this time, I was able to complete the task after the event reached silver.
Make sure the event is at silver before making any pizzas or waffles. Give yourself plenty of time as well!
Rewards for Completing the Appliance Wiz Aspiration
If you’ve completed this aspiration, congratulations! You probably spent more time around small appliances and Prepped Ingredients than anything else in the game at this point. You and your Sim have earned a reward for all your hard work, in the form of a new trait: Batch Cook. What this trait does has a clue in its name. If you make any recipe with Prepped Ingredients, your Sim will make extra servings up of it. This is very handy for the other Home Chef Hustle aspiration, Market Magnate, where you’ll be selling lots of stuff on the food stall.
While technically the only reward is the new trait, you’ll find that with completing this aspiration, your Sim will be better for it. They’ll have themselves a kitchen full of upgraded appliances. Their Cooking Skill will have improved, as well as their Handiness. If you didn’t before, you’ll learn the benefits of using fresh ingredients to make Prepped Ingredients. Also, you’ll discover why Prepped Ingredients are so beneficial in cooking recipes. All these things your Sim gained will certainly help if they decide to do the other aspiration, Market Magnate.
I ended up with two servings of Unpleasantly Pleasant Waffles with the Batch Cook Trait.
