Sour and spicy pickles stuffed with crisps, frothy sweetened coffee, one-pot feta and tomato pasta, ice cream wrapped in fruit roll-ups – these are just a few of the viral food trends that have taken TikTok and more social media platforms by storm.
For anyone who has tried these trending recipes, sometimes a great flavour combo can be discovered. Other times, however, they can prove positively disgusting.
Chef Holly Dalton joined Today with Claire Byrne to give her two cents on the recipes that go viral on social media, and whether they're actually worth putting in your mouth.
"I understand, okay? It's TikTok, it's an algorithm, what works better is if you watch the full thing so they're trying to get people's attention", Dalton said. "And I'm an idiot, I'm the one getting engaged, looking at this. It's my problem."
It's clear Dalton has seen her fair share of kitchen nightmares. One, she recalled, was a woman making a chicken pasta bake using an aluminium disposable tray. The one thing she forgot was to take the labels off the tray.
"Is this a joke, are we supposed to be laughing?" Dalton recalled.
Another involved everyone's favourite spicy nachos. "You get a bag of Doritos, you open it up, that sounds fairly okay so far. Then you get raw beef mince and cheese and salsa, you put it in the bag – raw, it's in the bag – and you get a pot of boiling water and you're gonna boil it all in the bag.
"I don't know a single food that has ever been improved by boiling it in a bag", Dalton said. "If you Googled 'grey' I'm pretty sure this is the definition of a grey food."
Dalton acknowledged that many of us look for cooking hacks that will speed up our time cooking, but from the sounds of that alone, that's not a quick recipe worth making.
Another sadly unforgettable recipe Dalton has come across involved cooking instant noodles, cracking an egg into them and blitzing them into a dough. This can then be used to make gnocchi, the easily bought and easily cooked Italian potato dumplings.
"There's so many levels of 'why' here. If you're going to go to the effort of rolling out gnocchi, you might even shape it with a fork, you might even put a bit of effort into it, why are you using instant noodles? The only thing you're substituting there are flour and boiled mashed potato."
That said, Dalton reasserted that she is the problem: "My instant, first reaction when I saw it was, 'That's cool.'"
So what makes these videos work, you might ask? The visuals are key, of course, and Dalton reckons a lot of it is to do with noise. "I've noticed a huge emphasis on crunch and texture, that is massive."
One such recipe was for rice paper summer rolls, which were then fried in a pan of oil. There was just one problem that wasn't covered in the video of a lady making these crunchy summer rolls.
"When you put them in the pan, I don't know what kind of witchcraft she was doing, they just melt. They don't crisp up, rice paper when it's been soaked doesn't crisp up. This is fake. This is not real."
There is one viral recipe that got Dalton's seal of approval, however: lasagne soup.
"I watched this loads before I made it, I couldn't get enough of this", she recalled. "You're basically making a tomato-based soup. Your regular lasagne ingredients, you've got your sofrito in there – finely diced celery, carrots, onions, normal stuff.
"You got your beef mince, you're gonna brown that off, you're gonna add in your passata, all this stuff. And then you get lasagne sheets and you're gonna break them up into large-ish pieces and you're gonna fold this through the soup and it thickens the soup."
The all-important bechamel sauce does not feature, but you can finish it with dollops of ricotta and torn basil.
"This works, I've made this", Dalton asserted.
To listen to Dalton's full chat about nasty viral recipes, and the ones that actually worked, click above.
