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Smelting

Smelting in Minecraft involves cooking, melting, and burning items in a furnace. By right-clicking the furnace, you can access its smelting grid where smelting operations can be performed. It consists of a slot for the item to be cooked, a slot for the fuel, and a slot for the obtained item.

Each smelting operation takes 10 seconds (i.e., 10 minutes and 40 seconds per stack of 64). Smelting begins when the player places the item to be cooked and the fuel in the respective slots. It continues even if the smelting interface is closed, as long as there are more items to cook, sufficient fuel, and space in the output slot. The fire icon decreases to represent the remaining fuel time. When the fire icon disappears, another fuel item is consumed, and smelting continues. If all items are cooked, the furnace will stop when the currently used fuel is exhausted. If there is no more fuel, the furnace becomes inactive. If a smelting process was underway at that time, it will be canceled and must be restarted from the beginning.

While items are cooking, an arrow indicates the progress of the process. When this arrow is filled, the cooked item then appears in the right slot, and smelting continues as long as there are items to cook and fuel.

If the player moves too far from the furnace or goes to another dimension, the chunk will become inactive, and smelting will stop until the player returns. If the player uses a bed during smelting, it will proceed at the same speed as if the player were not sleeping, not speeding up the process. This is due to the fact that when the player sleeps, time does not pass, and the game simply generates day.

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Smelting Recipes

Food

Result	Ingredient	Experience	Description
Cooked Porkchop	Raw Porkchop	0.35	Feeds 8 (🍗🍗🍗🍗) versus 3 (🍗🍗🍗) for raw meat.
Steak	Raw Beef	0.35	Feeds 8 (🍗🍗🍗🍗) versus 3 (🍗🍗🍗) for raw meat.
Roast Chicken	Raw Chicken	0.35	Feeds 6 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 2 (🍗🍗) for raw meat, with a chance of food poisoning.
Baked Potato	Potato	0.35	Feeds 6 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 1 (🍗) for raw potato.
Cooked Cod	Raw Cod	0.35	Feeds 5 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 2 (🍗🍗) for raw cod.
Cooked Salmon	Raw Salmon	0.35	Feeds 6 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 2 (🍗🍗) for raw salmon.
Cooked Rabbit	Raw Rabbit	0.35	Feeds 5 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 3 (🍗🍗🍗) for raw rabbit.
Cooked Mutton	Raw Mutton	0.35	Feeds 6 (🍗🍗🍗) versus 2 (🍗🍗) for raw mutton.
Dried Kelp	Kelp	0.1	Feeds 1 (🍗). Can be used to make a dried kelp block.

Ores and Materials

Result	Ingredient	Experience	Description
Iron Ingot	Iron Ore	0.7	Used to make other items.
Gold Ingot	Gold Ore	1.0	Used to make other items.
Glass	Sand Red Sand	0.1	Used to create transparent structures such as glass panes.
Stone	Cobblestone	0.1	Used as a building material and to make other blocks.
Bricks	Clay	0.3	Used to make bricks and flower pots.
Nether Bricks	Netherrack	0.1	Used to make Nether bricks.
Terracotta	Clay Block	0.35	Used as a building block. Also for making colored terracotta blocks.
Cracked Stone Bricks	Stone Bricks	0.3	Used as a building block. Also found in fortresses.
Glazed Terracotta	White Terracotta and other colors	0.1	Used as a building block.

Special Ores

These ores can be smelted, but it is not really useful because the items produced can be obtained without smelting. Ores can be obtained by mining them with the Silk Touch enchantment. Sometimes it is more advantageous to mine them to recover more resources, such as with the Fortune enchantment. Moreover, smelting them will yield much less experience.

Result	Ingredient	Experience	Description
Diamond	Diamond Ore	1.0	Used to make other items.
Lapis Lazuli	Lapis Lazuli Ore	0.2	Used for dyeing wool and for enchanting tools and armor.
Redstone	Redstone Ore	0.7	Used to design circuits or other electronic devices. Also used in the alembic and to make other items.
Coal	Coal Ore	0.1	Used to design torches or other essential elements. Also used as fuel.
Emerald	Emerald Ore	1.0	Used for trading with villagers.
Nether Quartz	Nether Quartz Ore	0.2	Used to make other items.

Tools, Weapons, and Armor

Result	Ingredient	Experience	Description
Iron Nugget	Iron Sword, Iron Pickaxe, Iron Axe, Iron Shovel, Iron Hoe, Iron Helmet, Iron Chestplate, Iron Leggings, Iron Boots, Iron Horse Armor	0.1	Used to make an Iron Ingot.
Gold Nugget	Golden Sword, Golden Pickaxe, Golden Axe, Golden Shovel, Golden Hoe, Golden Helmet, Golden Chestplate, Golden Leggings, Golden Boots, Golden Horse Armor	0.1	Used to make a Gold Ingot.

Others

Result	Ingredient	Experience	Description
Green Dye	Cactus	0.2	Used as dye.
Charcoal	Various types of Logs and Wood	0.15	Used to craft torches or other essential items. Also used as fuel.
Sponge	Wet Sponge	0.15	Absorbs water around it. If a lava bucket is used as fuel, it will be filled with water at the end of cooking.
Popped Chorus Fruit	Chorus Fruit	0.1	Used to make Purpur Blocks and End Rods.
Lime Dye	Sea Pickle	0.1	Used as dye.

Fuel

Once a fuel item starts burning, it cannot be stopped, but it is possible to remove items to cook at any time during cooking. Waste can be avoided by being careful to always keep items to cook as long as the fuel is consumed.

The lava bucket and coal block can burn more than 64 items while the furnace can only contain 64. To use them efficiently, it is necessary during the process, to add items to cook and remove cooked items. These manipulations can be done manually or using hoppers (note that these make the player lose the cooking experience - in 1.14 one can acquire the experience of all previously cooked items by manually retrieving an item from the furnace).

Fuel	Burning Duration	Number of Operations	Quantity to light a furnace all night	Duration per wood block	Quantity to burn a stack of 64 items
	1,000 s (16 min 40 s) 20,000 ticks	100	100	0.54	—
	800 s (13 min 20 s) 16,000 ticks	80	5,120	0.68	—
	200 s (3 min 20 s) 4,000 ticks	20	1,280	7.5	—
	120 s (2 min) 2,400 ticks	12	768	4.5	—
	80 s (1 min 20 s) 1,600 ticks	8	512	6.75	—
	80 s (1 min 20 s) 1,600 ticks	8	512	6.75	from 23.7 s to 80 s
	60 s (1 min) 1,200 ticks	6	6	9	?
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	15 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	15 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	60 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	30 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	36 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	15 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	40 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	20 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	15 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	10 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	7.5 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	6.9 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	40 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	7.5 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	7.5 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	—
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	120 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	?
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	1	36	80 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	96	36	34.3 s
	15 s 300 ticks	1.5	1	36	80 s
	10 s 200 ticks	1	1	54	from 5 s to 10 s
	10 s 200 ticks	1	16	54	19.2 s
	10 s 200 ticks	1	16	54	19.2 s

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All this information was retrieved from the official Minecraft Wiki.