The present invention relates to a cooking control method performed by a cooking apparatus for a food item. The method comprises obtaining a unique identifier and cooking data for the food item, and checking for a record of the unique identifier in a memory of the cooking apparatus. If a record of the unique identifier is located in the memory, then the cooking apparatus will not cook the food item. Otherwise a cooking process based on the cooking data to cook the food item is performed. Accordingly, cooking data for a given instance of a food item can only be used once in order to activate a cooking process performed by the cooking apparatus. The present invention also features product recall as well as the ability to track food item sales via a cooking data communications system.