Makarian Cauldron Brewing

Have you heard? There's two guys with wings who use these cauldrons for their cafe food. It's quite magical in a way you can only find in Makari.

The people of the Makari region of Mixolys have a unique cultural cooking tradition involving cauldrons. Essentially, it is cooking magic taken to a whole new level, and it takes a good deal of practice to be able to cook in this fashion. Indeed, sometimes the process can be used to create items other than food.
First, the brewer takes a base ingredient, which can be a food item or something else, and casts a spell to reduce it to a colorful powder, or "ash." This ash is added to a specially treated cauldron, along with reagents (sometimes food, sometimes not). The brewer performs a series of spells afterward to refine the product, selecting the qualities from the reagents they want to appear in the final result. Naturally, this requires a very strong mind's eye (among other mind's senses) to get a proper result.
After some time of brewing and scattering spells, a new product appears within the steam of the cauldron. Given the time and energy it takes to cook this way, most Makarians save it for special occasions only, or when they're searching for a specific taste or texture and can't find a normal food that aligns with it.
Depending on who you ask, cauldron brewing is more magical fusion than cooking. A few bar brawls have been started over what class of magic it even falls into. A passing commenter insists that it's a powerful form of "imagination magic," since once needs great presence of mind to replicate a flavor, texture, or other property.
There is a rumor that an underground organization has figured out how to take this process and use it to create homunculi, but no one has been able to confirm or deny such a thing.