And making crafting recipes more complex is a good way for them to get lost as people forget how to make them, especially now that food will poof instead of remain helpfully on a shelf for years to be analyzed.
This is my biggest worry with the new (awesome) change: sample items for rare and exotic treats will no longer be around, and so future PCs will no longer be able to gain access to the recipes (very easily, without asking staff). I hope someone in a position better than my current PC took a chance to jot them all down before the treats went poof. It's petty and minor, but it's a loss of lore.
I also know of a couple items that have so many rare ingredients, it is impossible to make up the actual item in the 36 hour window. I'm working with staff on one of them, but the solution would seem to be to preserve some of the individual ingredients -- e.g., instead of a juicy ginka fruit you'd have a dried ginka fruit, or something like that, or a pickled ginka fruit.
Pickled ginka is probably going to taste really nasty when baked into a pie.
On the other hand, I can totally see a jar of ginka preserves used to make pastries with flour, preserves, marilla sap and a pinch of white salt (no baking soda or baking powder in Arm - but we do have salt!). Could even add an egg if you want to use actual coded ingredients instead of virtual ones. However - using that much stuff should yield a whole lot more than just 2-3 pastries. Maybe if you include a plate on the floor or in your inventory, you'll end up with a plate full of them - a dozen 2-bite pastries. And those pastries will be edible for at least a week.
Anything using vegetable oil should last no more than a week - veggie oil left out to the elements goes rancid very very quickly. Animal fats, however, can last months. Butter at real-world room temperature can stay good for 6 months before it picks up too much ambient scent/dirt to retain its flavor, but will still melt into a cake batter. Butter in a refrigerator can stay good for years. Frozen butter, decades. Butter out in the zalanthan heat? Probably a month, tops, IF it doesn't liquefy before you need to use it.
Personally I like a modified version of d-man's idea, which is - actual components, instead of individual ingredients. So for that plate of ginka pastries:
You don't craft fruit + sugar + flour + salt + egg + oil + water + plate.
Instead, you
craft fruit + sugar to make the preserves.
Then you craft flour + egg + salt + oil + water to make dough.
Then you craft preserves + dough + plate to make plate of ginka pastries.
The preserves would last the longest before decay.
The dough would last the -least- longest.
The pastries would last somewhere in the middle.
