Recreating viral TikTok food videos
Written on August 3rd , 2021 by Debashmita Poddar
Last year was a tremendous sucess for TikTok. Let me give you a brief backstory of the app. TikTok is developed and owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance. The platform lets you share short videos (15s, 1m, 3m) on its platform. You can create any content of your choice, use hashtags to categorize it, add a soundtrack (original or score), and post it. You can think of it as Instagram, but for videos. You can like, comment, share a post like any other social media platforms. Last year, TikTok was ranked the third fastest growing brand. The reasoning behind this is simple. When people were under a lockdown and working from home, they started being creative to not feel bored. People started to share food recipes, household hacks, knowledge about different subjects, music, dance, art, and a lot more in a more creative way. Due to the time limit of a video, they had to keep it short and simple, thus resulting in a lot of interesting techniques which were a duck soup. The videos garnered a lot of attention for its momentary nature. The videos that were watched, loved and recreated million times were deemed to be viral.
We decided to try out some of the viral recipes from the food TikTok community. While choosing the food, we tried to find the ones which didn’t require a lot of special ingredients, were easy to recreate, fast, and looked edible. We tried to find a breakfast, drink, lunch, dinner and dessert recipe. We researched a bit and tried to find the original viral videos on TikTok to make the experience more authentic. Our picks were:
- Breakfast: Pesto eggs
- Drink: Dalgona coffee
- Lunch: Baked Feta pasta
- Dessert: Banana bread
- Dinner: Budget Ramen
First up, were the pesto eggs! I love pesto and I love eggs, so these two would definitely be a match made in heaven. You spread a generous amount of pesto in a pan and cook the eggs with pepper and red chilli flakes on it. Then take a slice of sourdough bread, spread a generous amount of ricotta, top it off with some smashed avocado. Place the cooked pesto eggs on top and finish it with a drizzle of honey. Sounds amazing, right? Well, it was not my favourite. Somehow the six components together didn’t work for me. The soudough bread with honey and ricotta tastes amazing. In Italy, it is served as a Bruschetta topping so it works quite well. Sourdough with avocado and eggs is a millennial thing, and I love it! Pesto with sourdough, works well too. But somehow, when I combined these classic ingredients, my taste buds entered a state of confusion. It was sweet and salty, but the individual flavour profile were not in harmony with each other. However, the pesto eggs individually were nicer than the sandwich. My suggestion is to keep them separate and not put too many ingredients on your plate. Overall score: 3/5
The next one is the most viral drink in TikTok from last year. The whipped coffee is a popular drink from South Korea, where they call it Dalgona coffee due to the texture. It is made by adding equal parts of instant coffee, sugar and hot water and whipped until it starts forming soft peaks. Then we mix it with hot or cold milk, that gives the coffee a caffeteria kind of froth on top. In most of the videos we saw on TikTok, the whipping was done by hand with a whisk or fork, but we decided to use an electric mixer because it takes about half an hour by hand. The original video added the whipped coffee to a glass of milk with some ice cubes, so we did the same. Well! The ingredients were the same things you add in a regular coffee, but the whisking makes all the difference. After mixing the coffee with milk, it formed an amazing froth on top, thus giving it a luxurious Café coffee feel. Full marks to the technique, but the recipe lacks some creativity. Overall score: 4/5
Another major viral recipe from our list is the baked feta pasta. In a baking tray, place a block of feta cheese and surround it with cherry tomatoes. Drop in a few cloves of garlic, drizzle a generous amount of olive oil, sprinkle some chili flakes, black pepper, flakey salt and put it in the oven. Boil some pasta of your choice, and reserve some pasta water for later. Take out the baking tray from the oven and smash the tomatoes, cheese, garlic cloves. Chop some fresh basil and add it in the tray and mix everything together. Add the boiled pasta and mix everything together. Add some of the reserved pasta water, if the sauce becomes too thick. The recipe was introduced by a Finnish lady, and it blew up! It became so viral, that it was impossible to find feta cheese in Finland! You can never go wrong with tomato sauce and pasta, but the feta took it to the next level. The sauce was creamy and clung to the pasta! People started using different cheeses to recreate this simple homely dish. This was my favourite TikTok recipe, and I’ll continue to make it because of the fresh ingredients, simplicity and homeliness induced by it. Overall score: 5/5
Time for a dessert. Do you have overripe bananas lying on your kitchen counter? This recipe is the perfect way to use those bananas. It’s called banana bread, but it’s more like a cake. The recipe is quite old, but became super viral last year on TikTok. I guess a lot of people were dealing with depression and overripe bananas! Make a batter with all-purpose flour, sugar, soft butter, overripe bananas, eggs, vanilla extract, baking soda. We also added some left over chocolate chips to the batter. Then pour the batter in a oil coated baking tray and bake. The bread forms a nice crust and is moist inside. I really loved a warm slice of the banana bread with my evening tea. However, the next day, it didn’t taste as good as it did when it was fresh out of the oven. Since it’s a recipe from decades ago, and TikTok made it famous, it loses some points on the creativity part. Overall score: 4/5
The last recipe was created by a woman who wanted to make a budget friendly lunch for her husband. She uses the store bought instant noodles, but makes her own sauce instead of using the seasoning packets that comes along with those noodles. Now, we all know that the seasoning packets contain a truck full of salt, MSG, and other chemicals that under excess consumption can make you sick. She manages to make a super simple sauce with the most basic ingredients: butter, garlic, chili flakes, brown sugar and soy sauce. Then she mixes the cooked instant noodles with the sauce, adds an egg for the protein and garnishes with some green onions and Everything but the Bagel Sesame seasoning from Trader Joe’s. Since we are not living in the US, we couldn’t find this specific seasoning, so we substituted it with sesame seeds instead. The recipe was so simple and budget friendly, that it became viral overnight. It was the perfect dorm food, which tasted good without the seasoning packet. There were many spin-offs to the sauce by using chili oil or peanut butter, but the idea of making your own sauce made it famous. The whole package tasted great and didn’t make a hole in the pocket, but can I eat it everyday? No. The nutritional value is still not great, and we can’t substitute actual meals with hangover food. Overall score: 3/5
TikTok has some really amazing content creators, and this post is a personal opinion about those TikTok food videos that went viral. Go ahead, try some new things that you see on TikTok. I can assure you, some of them will come in handy. For me, it was the baked feta pasta.