Chopped sandwiches
Those of you familiar with Heinz sandwich spread will appreciate the idea behind chopped sandwiches. (If you don’t know what sandwich spread is, count your blessings.) Chopped sandwiches contain everything in sandwich spread, plus ham and cheese, but mercifully, none of the ingredients are suspended in a puddle of suspiciously translucent mayonnaise. Like lots of viral cookery content, chopped sandwiches are as much about the process as the result; videos show a bunch of fillings being chopped finely on a board – ham, cheese, vegetables, eggs, gherkins – then smushed into a Subway-style baguette, squished and cleft neatly in twain to reveal a colourful mosaic filling. Pleasing to the eye, and to the Italian deli customers of New York, where the trend originated.
Girl dinner/boy dinner
“Girl dinner” has been trending all summer and shows no signs of growing up into “woman dinner” anytime soon. For anyone not in the know, girl dinner is superfluously gendered picky tea. Think olives, ham, picnic eggs, crackers, hummus, baby carrots, grapes and whatever else might have been floating in the fridge/freezer for a while. The girl dinner phenomenon is multifaceted: on one hand it alleviates expectations of what dinner “should” look like, and has opened up the idea of eating an imperfect meal on social media – an almost radical act in a sea of brightly dressed, “nutritionist-approved” bowlfood. On the other hand, girl dinner toes the line of disordered eating in a socially acceptable manner, seeing as so many are positively homoeopathic in quantity – although this is, admittedly, a darker interpretation of the mostly comedic trend.
My favourite offshoot, however, is boy dinner. These videos vary in their visuals (containing everything from beer to steak to cats in the fridge) but are often backed by a cover version of Jacob Collier’s arrangement of Moon River, except the opening lyrics have been changed to “boy dinner”. I can forgive all sexism when the harmony is this delicious.
Pistachio paste/Nutella/Biscoff
The 2016–18 trend of splitting open pastries or bakes to reveal a pool of Nutella has undergone Shrekification: pistachios are the new hazelnut spread, and everything is oozing green paste because – let’s face it – it’s approximately 11 times more delicious than Nutella or Biscoff. One area where this trend has particularly taken off is sexy industrial-scale bakery content (SISBC), which sees a sexy industrial bakery content man manipulate vast quantities of green dough and smirk at the camera before tearing into one of the most perfect-looking pastries you’ve ever seen in your life.
Food mashups
Just like cover versions, remixes and Simon Cowell’s face, we absolutely love experiencing the old mixed with the new – especially when it involves combining two familiar foodstuffs to make something novel and exciting. Baked goods are especially susceptible to this trend, whether it’s brownies and cookies (brookies) or doughnuts and croissants (cronuts). Right now baklava cakes and creme brulee cookies are hot on the socials, but savoury mashups of tater tot pizzas and yorkshire puddings filled with cottage pie are also gaining in popularity.
A summary of the food mashup trend wouldn’t be complete without a mention of @elburritomonster, the food creator who has tickled any sort of culinary cultural appropriation into submission, making it admit – wheezily – that there’s actually nothing wrong with a tandoori burger chicken wrap burrito with a samosa crust and a chimichurri dip. My gallbladder has to wear sunglasses when I watch his videos. This is not a criticism.
Tanghulu
Imagine you could shrink snooker balls, thread them on to a barbecue skewer and crunch your way through, one by one. Well, tanghulu – brightly coloured fruit skewers originating in China – are about as close as you can get to this sensory utopia. Traditionally made with hawthorn berries coated in a clear candy glaze, tanghulu’s appeal lies in the glistening shell, which shatters at first bite, giving way to the sweet fruit underneath. While they only contain three ingredients (fruit, sugar, water), tanghulu are fiendishly difficult to execute at home, and definitely fall into the category of TikTok trends to enjoy from a distance – unless you’d like to ruin a punnet of perfectly decent strawberries and glue yourself to your hob with molten sugar syrup.
Date bark (not an instruction)
TikTok is full of “healthy” desserts, many of which involve an odious combination of protein powder, cottage cheese, cocoa powder, stevia, cinnamon and other misguided alternatives to things which actually taste nice, like butter and sugar. But the newest “healthy” dessert trend, date bark, actually looks like a great idea. Just open up a few sticky dates, spread over greaseproof paper in a sort of flattish patty, top with peanut butter and melted dark chocolate, sprinkle with sea salt and freeze or chill until set and chewy. What’s not to like? Oh? You’d prefer to dive headfirst into a tiramisu? Point taken.
• Fliss Freeborn is the author of Do Yourself a Flavour: 75 Recipes to Feed Your Friends, Your Flatmates and Your Freezer, and is the winner of the Fortnum and Mason 2023 Cookery Writer of the Year Award
• This article was amended on 15 October 2023. An earlier version said that tanghulu were usually made with strawberries. In fact they are traditionally made with hawthorn berries.
