Social media is its own search engine (sorry Google) and in 2024 Tiktok and Instagram continued to influence our cookery habits with different trending ingredients and viral recipes that no feed was safe from.
How many of these 'viral' food trends have you tried this year?
Jalapeno rose & frozen grated jalapeno
2024 has been spicy! Jalapeño became the unlikely 'IT' chilli of 2024 by finding itself being frozen and finely grated over dishes for a spicy, tingling granita affect on many dishes (check out @LaoiseCooks reel) and also slices of jalapeño found themselves appointed into many glasses of rosé, particularly in summer and influenced by Alyssa in the Kitchen on TikTok.
Not convinced? Apparently what started as a happy accident in 2022 has born the ability to even turn bottom shelf rosé - usually very, very sweet - far more balanced and palatable...
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Cucumber (salad and otherwise)
Viral recipes can be healthy, too! Eating your greens has been prioritised in '24 (see also: Brat Green below) and if you ever lacked inspiration for that cucumber hurtling towards its best before date in the crisper compartment of your fridge, sliced cucumber dressed or as a base for a salad is for you. Made mostly viral by a sole Canadian creator, Logan Moffitt @logaGM, who has embraced the given moniker "the cucumber guy", he now specialises in unique ways with cucumbers and almost always starts videos with slicing whole cucumber on a mandolin. Never suffer from a lack of cucumber recipe inspiration again...
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Tanghulu
A Chinese street food that is not new by any stretch of the imagination but the internet proper seemed to embrace these hard sugar-coated fruit skewers en masse in 2024. That satisfying ASMR-style crunch, alone, is iconic.
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"Marry Me" Chicken (and more)
It started with "Marry Me Chicken", a one-pan chicken recipe in a creamy tomato sauce that may just prompt a proposal to the chef from the person it's served to, such is its sublime deliciousness. Slightly silly but this has been a secret to going viral for many creators, receiving views in the tens of millions for some of their own replications. That recipe pre-dates 2024 but has continued and even evolved into other iterations: Marry Me Pasta, Marry Me Cheesecake, even Marry Me Chicken Pie, Pasta Bake and Chicken Curry.
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Chopped salads/sandwiches
Are you still layering sandwiches hoping to get a bit of every ingredient in each mouthful? Chopped sandwich fillings took over in 2024 and, hate to say it, it does make sense. Rather than dutifully layering all the ingredients, instead the filling is roughly chopped directly on the chopping board, maybe bound by a little mayo or dressing, and then spooned onto your awaiting vessel, whether that be a bread roll or a tortilla for a burrito.
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The Crookie
What do you get when you cross a cookie with a croissant? The 'Crookie' - which consists of cookie dough being baked into croissants that have been split through the middle - is believed to have originated in Parisian bakery Boulangerie Louvard in late 2023 and 2024 has seen endless recreations appear online, again Donal Skehan has been at the apex of the trend.
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Cottage cheese, everything
Those of a certain age remember cottage cheese being held up as a sad, flavourless fad food of diet culture in the Nineties and Noughties but it is back with a bang. A trend that started in late 2023 carried through throughout 2024, cottage cheese still remains a fairly bland and uninspiring dairy product but for a relative high volume it offers a low calorie base and high protein content which made it an unlikely star of recipes which often use it as a base, like topped toasts, or in sauces like chicken alfredo.
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Feta Fried Eggs
Another trend that has outlasted its original year, frying your eggs in crumbled feta began appearing in mid/late 2023 and has consistently continued through 2024. As the originator, Grace Elkus (who was riffing Ali Slagle's crispy potato, egg and cheese tacos), explains: "a feta fried egg is exactly what it sounds like: an egg fried atop crumbly feta cheese. As the egg cooks, the feta melts and crisps, resulting in a tangy, salty, crispy-edged egg that will ruin you for all other preparations".
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Cooking upside down
It's all about the reveal. Covering things in puff pastry to bake and then upturning to reveal has taken off in 2024, and the likes of Dominic Franks @DomInTheKitchen has embraced this niche wholeheartedly and jumped hundreds of thousands of followers recently with millions of views of his recipe videos.
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Christmas Chip
You have heard of all manner of topped fries. Cheesy chips, taco fries, gravy-drowned Poutine, but at this festive time of year why can't you have a full Christmas dinner atop chips? At Selby's Traditional Fish & Chips on the Falls Road in Belfast you can get exactly that for the neat price of £7.95. This annual delicacy usually only arrives on the menu as a seasonal addition the day after Halloween but this year demand was so big they brought it forward a month to 1st October. It seems to be a thing across many different fish and chip shops around Northern Ireland but Selby's went particularly viral this year.
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Spice Bags
Speaking of chips, the Spice Bag - which Ireland wholly claims as its own and is now in contention in the league of national dishes - has landed Down Under in a big way this year. Aussies and Kiwis are discovering this salt and chilli-spiked sensation and going mad for it with their own recreations and many restaurants and take-aways offer their own versions. Man of the moment Paul Mescal even had a hand to play in boosting the phenomenon. Elsewhere, beauty influencer James Charles also posted a mukbang at Xi'an Street Food in Dublin city centre at the start of this year.
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Brat Green
Whether you partook in a Brat Summer (as decreed by Charli XCX) or not, the simple, almost basic branding of the Brat album - with its neon green background and stretched arial font - was arguably the shade of the year. So much so it tipped over into food trends with brat green being the most unlikely entirely desirable shade. Think guacamole, green smoothies, appletinis, pesto pasta.
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