6 TikTok Food Trends We’d Totally Try (and 3 We’d Skip)

Whipping up a new recipe from the internet is always a gamble—just because it shows up in your search first doesn’t mean it’s been tested and tweaked to perfection. So naturally, we approach TikTok food trends with a healthy dose of skepticism. But to our delight, we’ve found a few recipes we’d absolutely make at home (and a few we already love). Here, six TikTok food trends to try, plus three you might want to skip.

Eggs fried in olive oil? Yawn. Eggs fried in basil pesto, however, are just interesting enough to get us out of bed. The premise is simple: Since pesto is mostly oil, you can use it as a cooking fat to fry or scramble eggs in a skillet. Add a piece of ricotta toast and a few slices of avocado and you’re really cooking with…pesto.

All it took was one vertical slit in a flour tortilla for us to never look at a wrap the same way again. The tortilla fold “hack,” as one might call it, is equal parts logical and versatile: Create a slit halfway through the tortilla’s diameter, divide it into four quadrants, then fill and fold before crisping in a skillet. We’ve seen everything from cheeseburgers to chicken cutlets to s’mores, proving there’s no limit to what you can do with a wrap.

The cornstarch-egg-sugar combination sure beats its 2016 predecessor, which was flat, diet-driven and a little sad, but we’re just not sure where this version fits in our repertoire. Is it bread or dessert?

Admittedly, we weren’t convinced when this baked pasta trend first surfaced. Surely the crumbly feta would make for a grainy pasta sauce. But we were proven wrong when we saw the recipe make its meteoric rise to fame (and when we couldn’t even find feta at our Trader Joe’s). TBH, we’re more intrigued by the variations that have surfaced—like baked buffalo mac and cheese—but the original is so simple that you should give it a try first.

No meat, no problem. These vegan “ribs” start with corn on the cob and an air fryer. Add a smoky barbecue spice blend and in 20 minutes, you’re left with a crispy-on-the-outside, juicy-on-the-inside side dish. The trick is to slice the raw cobs into small strips. This exposes the cob, which shrinks and dries out in the air fryer, making the corn look like pork ribs. (The name is a little misleading, as the corn tastes nothing like ribs, but who doesn’t love corn anyway?)

This is just a variation on rigatoni pie, where the noodles are stood on end inside a springform pan then topped with cheese and sauce before baking. But we have to wonder, does anyone have time to assemble the pasta and stuff each noodle with an individual piece of cheese? (Also, the appearance triggers our fear of holes. Don’t Google it.)

We love vegan cook Tabitha Brown for a million reasons, and her recipe for carrot “bacon” is just one of them. Like corn “ribs,” this viral recipe involves an air fryer, but you can make it in a conventional oven too. Ribbons of carrot are glazed in a maple syrup spice mixture (with a dash of liquid smoke), then cooked until crisp. The seasoning does the heavy lifting, adding a savory-smoky flavor that really does taste like bacon.

Most trends have deeper origins than TikTok, and such is the case with birria. The Mexican meat stew is thought to have originated in Jalisco, but it was also served inside tacos in Tijuana before making its way stateside. Fast forward to now, when the TikTok hashtag for “birria” has garnered some 148 million views.

We love DIY cooking projects, and we love seitan (a wheat-based meat analogue). But we don’t have the patience to wash flour multiple times and turn a ball of dough into meatless chicken. If you have the time, we’ve seen many a TikTok-er successfully reproduce the recipe, but we’ll pass and buy it at the store if only to avoid the inevitable tears.