@KATENESS If you check in your sim's skill journal, each recipe has a base quality listed next to it. The natural cook trait (as well as perfectionist), the menu maven skill challenge, and high quality ingredients all help upgrade the quality of the meal. So does cooking it over and over—the base quality listed in the skill journal increases by one level for every ten times your sim cooks that particular meal.
Since tri-tip steak and stuffed turkey are considered "great" all by themselves, they don't have so far to go to become perfect; the fact that you can use multiple perfect ingredients to make them also helps. But grilled cheese and goopy carbonara start at such a low level that it's almost impossible to get them to perfect quality... unless you have the Minus One Kelvin fridge from reaching the top of the culinary career. The bump from that will let you make a perfect version of almost anything. If you don't want to go through the entire career, you can use nraas MasterController to make your sim a level-9 chef and then just wait for the promotion. The item is probably also available using buydebug, although I've never looked for it there.
