So I figured some things out about the crafting system that seemed pretty obscure to me and I wasn't able to find the answers here when I was trying to learn about it so now that I know some things I'm gonna share them for anybody who doesn't already know:
The game says you can craft frag and shock bombs into timed variants by cooking them with "dirty" rags and it took me embarrassingly long to realize that meant the dirty clothes, but I also found out the civilian clothes and satchel also count. I don't think bombs are all that expensive to buy outright but if you want to invest time into crafting them instead, the crystal caverns are a decent place to farm saltpeter and phosphor (assuming you're not playing with fetishes on and cooking your excretions, because that makes saltpeter and phosphor too). The situation isn't like smoking meat or drying your veggies though, you need an equal amount of clothing to bombs. In my testing all the bombs I was trying to upgrade a tier were merged into one when I tried doing that.
This one took me the longest to figure out, but you can get 4x oil by cooking 2x meat stews and you can make molotovs with 6x oil. Honestly, it says it on the wiki but it's phrased as 2x File:Fat Meat.gif "Meat Fat" -> 4x Oil and I just assumed "Meat Fat" was some placeholder asset and the recipe wasn't working yet haha!
So yeah, if you already knew then this didn't help you, but info is not easy to find in 255 pages of this forum and the search function doesn't get specific enough to really ferret out information so I thought I'd put it out there as the latest post so people might see it.