What are the most profitable meals and elixirs I can cook?

For meals, this reddit post describes a good way to make money. It describes getting lots of boar and deer meat, then making 5-meat skewers (use the same time of meat for each, if possible). Supposedly, the deer skewers sell for 210 and the boar meat ones sell for 120, and this is one of the get rich quick schemes the game offers.

From the post, here is a fast way to gather meat:

Near Hateno Village, there is farmer named Dantz up on the large hillside pitching hay under a horse stable who offers a mini-game to hunt deer that can be spammed and will reward you with 5 rupees or 20 rupees depending on the number of deer you kill in the time limit.

This by itself is not the money maker, though. All the meat you get from the animals you kill is. To ensure maximum meat gain, a three-spread-shot bow is the best choice. However, you can also get a Soldier's Bow on the crate of the east side of the Tabantha Bridge Stable, which will kill the animals in one shot.

It's recommended to either wear the full Sheikah set or get other stealth buffs (potions, etc) to make this easier.

5 raw gourmet meats cooked = full recovery meat skewer= $490 best ive found so far other than a $500 diamond

I personally hunt for Raw Gourmet Meat and Raw Prime Meat mainly around the snowy north west fields of the map from wolves, moose and the fur rhinos using boomerangs on foot or halberds and spears on horse back (quick press of the X button to jump dismount and gather before they freeze in colder weather). I gather weapons from the Ice Lizalfos in the area (fire arrows ftw here, use dismount quick draw if riding your horse).

I cook a Meat Skewer from 4 Raw Gourmet and 1 Raw Prime Meat to get a 25+ Skewer worth 440. I look at it as 100 per each Gourmet and 40 for the Prime and I can cook it near Beedle and sell it as many times a day as I want, Cheers Beedle. Hope this helps, I haven't really looked too far into other recipes because this just worked well for me early on.

Five endura carrots cooked at blood moon sells for 420 rupees.

I have found that creating elixirs using specific monster parts yields extremely expensive potions. I've experimented with several parts, but it seems like the monster guts are the most profitable. Combine 4 guts with 1 bug/frog/etc to create an elixir. The effect of the elixir doesn't matter, since your goal is to make money. (To maximize profits, the effect ingredient should be something worth more money, such as a hearty lizard or a tireless frog; however, you'll only be making an extra 50 or so rupees, so it's probably not worth using rare ingredients here - stick to darners and fireflies.)

You can use any guts you find, but in my opinion the most cost effective are Molduga and Lynel guts. When combining 4 guts with 1 elixir ingredient, the resulting potions will be worth about 1200 rupees (300 per gut) or 2400 (600 per gut) for Molduga or Lynel guts respectively.

Whatever you do, do not use star fragments or dragon pieces in your crafted food/elixirs if your goal is profit. Even though the base value of these items is very high, for some reason this value doesn't seem to get included in the price of the resulting food item.

1 raw gourmet meat + 4 endura carrots = 440 rupees.

Video here.

Tried and true:

• 2 x Raw Gourmet Meat
• 2 x Rock Salt
• 1 x Hearty Truffle

= 230 Rupees

I sold mine to the market lady on the south eastern beach but I've sold them elsewhere too. I feel like I ran across a higher price selling meal but can't remember the recipe...I think it was a fluke.

So I did some poking around, and while the numbers in @Pyritie seem reasonable, I feel like there's got to be a way to game the system, at least given what we know about "rounding". So I did some playing around with some single items, and found that a single apple (3 rupee sell price) sells for 10 rupees when cooked, for a grand total "profit" value of 3.33x. Interestingly, if you cook 5 of them, you get an item that sells for 50 rupees, for a true multiplier of also 3.33x. However, you can do better :)

A single acorn can sell for 2 rupees, and due to some vagaries at the low end, still sells for 8 rupees when cooked, for a multiplier of 4x, which is the highest that I've seen so far. Interestingly, 5 of them sell for only 30 rupees, which certainly follows the right pattern (namely 5*2=10, and sells for 28 rounded to 30 rupees), for a profit multiplier of 3x, which is less than the 4x you get by cooking just 1.

The system favors cheaper items than more expensive items due to weirdness of rounding at low numbers. While this gives you the maximum margin of difference between the ingredient sell price and the cooked value that I've found so far, it's not fast to do, however. But you do make more total difference between sale price of ingredients vs. selling price of cooked food, that way than other things that I've come across. Perhaps a more in-depth way to figure it out would be good. If you can find 1000 rupees worth of acorns (500 of them), they'll sell for 4000 rupees, which is more than any other set of combination of items with an ingredient sale price of 1000 will sell for. Apples (and other 3 rupee base price items) will sell for up to 3333 rupees. 250 of 4 rupee base items will sell for about 3000 rupees cooked (when combined into 5 items, only 2500 otherwise), and everything else is between 2800 and 3000. Very time consuming (how the heck are you going to find 500 acorns, plus then cook one at a time, then vendor 500 items), but maximizes profits at the expense of time.

Generally, the post that @Pyritie made is correct, though.