Mid-2023 Trends from The Food Channel

Insight companies (which The Food Channel has partnered with since its inception), base their trend reporting on data: surveys, analysis of consumer behavior, scientific advances, and the numbers behind the behavior. Food manufacturers and others …

Insight companies (which The Food Channel has partnered with since its inception), base their trend reporting on data: surveys, analysis of consumer behavior, scientific advances, and the numbers behind the behavior. Food manufacturers and others pay big money to access those reports.

Two things, however, have made trend reporting muddy. First, the internet. Sure, online polling and observation offered new ways of watching the trends. It also put new voices on the scene, some trained and some not-so-trained. Second, the COVID crisis, when all bets were off and consumers went into survival mode, where trends just didn’t seem to matter as much.

Now, companies are tentatively finding their way back. With that in mind, we are publishing a mid-year trend piece just to get the juices flowing again. Here are five of our Top Food Trends for Mid-2023:

Photo by Simon Hermans on Unsplash

1) Food & Travel Changes. Yelp and TripAdvisor have gotten cluttered, and TikTok has added to the mix to the point that many no longer know where to turn for reliable information. What’s sponsored and what is truly a consumer experience? Do you use Expedia, Travelocity, Hotel Tonight, reward apps direct to the hotel…and when are they all the same thing/owned by the same parent? As more Boomers enter retirement and have time to travel, how do they figure it all out?

Many are falling back on traditional travel agents, even though they are often hidden behind a .com name. Companies such as cruisetraveloutlet.com, and others, are offering bundled options and all-inclusives that recognize that some people travel specifically for the food experiences. Culinary tours continue to spring up, and we expect to see more. Travel has changed, and food travel has become its own niche opportunity.

(To begin your research on culinary tours check out sites such as these: https://www.exploreworldwide.com/experiences/
https://www.culturediscovery.com
https://www.zicasso.com/italy/food-tours-vacations
https://www.foodnwinevacations.com/culinary-tours-italy)

2) The Conversation Around Tipping. We first called this out in a column in 2015, then in our Trends Report in 2016. We’d been following a conversation started by noted restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer, among others, and saw early hints that there would be a call for change. Now, with tip jars on counters and machines that ask for your tip before they move forward, well, consumers are starting their own conversation. We’re hearing words like “enough,” and “I draw the line.” At the same time, consumers recognize that workers often rely on tips, and want to help. When will the conversation move into action, and what will be the final impetus for change?

3) Customer Service. Granted, this has been iffy for years, and the fallout from recent events has made it worse simply because companies are short-staffed and don’t always have time for advance training. Restaurants are focusing on the need to create a place where people want to come. Consumers want to be around people who appreciate their patronage. This is the opportunity area: Nurturing staff members who are excited to help customers find what they may not even know they want. Less shrugging of shoulders and more extensions of consideration. It requires knowledge, training, but most off all attitude.

This is crucial as restaurant service is recognized as a long-term career, not an interim or high school job. That means the incentives have to be better, and the industry has to work harder at this.

Photo by ArtiSims Boards, Boxes & Bites (available on Facebook)
Artisims@yahoo.com

4) Charcuterie anything. For a while it was food flights, where bars and restauranteurs offered tastings. They can be fun, actually—pancake flights, beer flights, cheese flights, dessert flights, and more. The next step seems to be putting them all together on one big board…or into something innovative (snackle box, anyone?). Celebrity Chef Tyler Florence has reportedly even called out “tin fish boards” as the new charcuterie—using cans of caviar and other tinned fish.

People are playing with size, too, making mini-boards for personal feasting and table-length boards with multiple options beyond the traditional meat and cheese. TikTok Influencer and “private chef in the Hamptons” Cooking Classy (also known as Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen) has been known to comment that “cheese chunks and crackers are not charcuterie,” and she’s not wrong. After all, the origins of charcuterie are about charred meat, paired with cheeses and any number of sweet and savory items for flavor and texture. That includes pickles and olives, various spreads and preserves, mustards, honey, fresh fruit, and more.

Presentation is part of making food fun, and it’s a great way to make food both entertaining and safely sharable. So, bring on the Charcuterie Brunch and the Charcuterie Chocolate boards.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

5) Pickles. We always try to offer at least one specific food item that answers the question, “What’s the on-trend food item?” When the Chick-fil-A app allows you to remove its famous pickles from a chicken sandwich, it makes you wonder how popular that option would be, because pickles are in the limelight right now. It goes along with our previous trends that identified an interest in brining, although the latest interest extends to the pickle juice itself—cooking with it, reusing it, even drinking it. And it’s not just cucumbers. Sandwiches have pickled onions, as do tacos. Pickles and all-things-pickled are turning up as something more than a condiment right now, and are worth watching.

That’s our top five for a mid-year checkpoint of food trends. We’re also watching as more and more restaurants begin charging an additional percentage to use a credit card. We’re watching AI and the pros and cons and how they will affect the industry. We keep an eye on the kinds of grocery stores where people collect their merchandise and even shop and ship for others (yes, Trader Joes, but it’s catching on). Food prices and availability are still discussion topics, and lots more.

In the past we’ve brought you mushrooms/mushroom coffee, plant-based, seafood, nostalgia foods, mocktails, food as medicine, THC, Ube, African food, fermented, hatch chilis, and more—all before they were regularly talked about. For fun, go back and look at a few from the past. After all, knowing what has come before is often the first step to understanding what’s next.

Food TikTokers You Should Know: The Crazy Comedian Vintage Recipe Tester

It’s not unusual to find people on TikTok or Instagram putting old recipes to the test – often with great trepidation. It is unusual to find someone who combines the zinging one-liners of Rodney Dangerfield with the oddball charisma of Ed Grimley …

It’s not unusual to find people on TikTok or Instagram putting old recipes to the test — often with great trepidation. It is unusual to find someone who combines the zinging one-liners of Rodney Dangerfield with the oddball charisma of Ed Grimley (Martin Short circa 1984) or Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens circa 1983). 

Meet B. Dylan Hollis, a man who may not need much introduction based on the size of his followings: He has 8.2 million TikTok followers, 1.1 million subscribers on Youtube, and 396,000 followers on Instagram (no recipe testing here, just pics and videos, sometimes playing the accordion). His recipe-testing videos are universally short and generally follow the same template:

  • screaming recitation of the recipe name and era when it was created
  • joke about said name of dish or concept
  • jiggling pompadour a la Conan O’Brien
  • incredulity when reading certain ingredients
  • sour face when tasting the abomination he’s made

But Hollis is not just making fun of old recipes. He clearly knows his subject; he’s finding these arcane recipes somewhere (he collects them apparently) and he’s genuinely taking the time to test them out, one by one  — since 2020 as far as we can tell. It’s hard to deny his charisma; his eyebrows have a life of their own, the double entendres fly, and the pace is rapid-fire.

Below, I’ve selected three recipes that demonstrate his skills. You’ll get the idea 10 seconds into any of them. But I bet you’ll click to see a second one too.

 

Who: B. Dylan Hollis

https://www.tiktok.com/@bdylanhollis

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkEssvZ2uu_ntlIGy64GIg

https://www.instagram.com/bdylanhollis/

 

What: Vintage Recipes

 

Jellied Meatloaf from 1931

@bdylanhollis

What could go wrong? #baking #vintage #cooking #jello

♬ original sound – B. Dylan Hollis

0:08 “Who’s mooing now,” he screams at a pan of ground beef.

0:18 “You know what stings more than a knife Mr. Onion? Rejection!”

0:51 “It’s a cat food recipe!”

 

Ration Cake from 1942

@bdylanhollis

I have no words for what came out of the oven #baking #vintage #cooking #cake

♬ original sound – B. Dylan Hollis

0:02So it’s the ‘40s and we don’t have any butter, sugar, milk or eggs and we need to bake a cake!”

0:29Looks like barbecue sauce, smells of death.”

0:54 The sour face he makes at the end of many of his videos.

 

Water Pie from 1929

@bdylanhollis

Hands down the worst so far #vintage #baking #cooking #recipe

♬ original sound – B. Dylan Hollis

0:02 “Can you make a pie with 4 ingredients? Yes, I could also eat my mattress.”

0:21 “Add 3 gills of water… is this written for a fish?”

0:36Finished a bit early… like my ex.”

 

 

The Best Beef Bourguignon Recipe: Julia Child’s vs Everyone Else’s

Julia Child demonstrates how to cook Boeuf Bourguignon on The French Chef, a TV show produced by WGBH, and shot in Boston from 1963 to 1973.

• Julia Child’s debut, on “The French Chef” (WGBH in Boston) aired as a pilot on July 26, 1962.

• She would continue to teach on camera, and in seminal cookbooks, for three more decades.

• In this video, she demonstrates how to cook a seminal dish, Beef (Boeuf) Bourguignon; we compare her recipe to what’s on TikTok and Youtube. 

 

Culinary icon Julia Child is famous for many things: her cookbooks, her TV shows, her height (6’2″), and her unusual voice. Her crowning achievement, however, was the skill with which she explained French recipes; it turned on generations of home cooks. Though she is famous for cooking many seminal dishes — like Coq au Vin and French Onion Soup — her signature dish is Beef (Boeuf) Bourguignon.

In this video, she demonstrates how to cook Boeuf Bourguignon on “The French Chef” — which aired on February 11, 1963, on WGBH in Boston — as well as how to brown and braise meat, what it takes to make a great brown sauce, how to braise onions, and how to cut and sauté mushrooms.

We’ve highlighted some key moments with timestamps so you don’t have to watch the whole thing through.

 

Key Moments

0:30 Theme song plays

1:12 Child rattles off all of the skills she will demo: how to brown and braise meat, what it takes to make a great brown sauce, how to braise onions, and how to cut and sauté mushrooms.

3:00 Shocking use of paper towels to soak up the moisture of the meat—something you can be sure did not exist in previous recipes of this dish (which dates back to the Middles Ages).

15:11 Here she dries off the mushrooms with cloth towels (so they brown properly) and basically says no one should fret about the soiling of the towels as long as they have “electric washing machines.”

 

Background of Beef Bourguignon

Julia Child was not the first chef to appear on TV, but she was by far the most influential one. She starred in The French Chef, which debuted on February 11, 1963, on WGBH (in Boston) and ran nationally for ten years. It won a Peabody Award and the first Emmy for an educational program.

This now-classic french bistro recipe is essentially a beef stew, slow-cooked and braised in red wine with potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, garlic, onions and a bouquet garni (bundle of thyme, parsley, and bay leaves). Child includes lardons as well; not everyone does.

Other variations include adding a pig’s trotter, using beef cheek, marinating the meat in advance, and caramelizing the onions. You would be wise to pair this with wine from Burgundy (Bourguignon being the provenance of the dish).

One of the earliest written versions of beef bourguignon was penned by legendary chef Auguste Escoffier, who described it in 1903.

 

The Popularity of #boeufbourgignon

On TikTok, there are tk recipes tagged with #boeufbourgignon. Some of the most popular ones have already been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. This video, like many, edits the recipe down to 59 seconds, in an evocative, albeit wordless, visual montage.

@theemoodyfoody

Beef Bourguignon, Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon✨ #food #cooking #asmr #ramsayreacts #movie #film #recipe #chef #fyp #calm #relaxing #music

♬ UNDERWATER WONDERSCAPES (MASTER) – Frederic Bernard

Best Beef Bourguignon Recipe for People in a Hurry

Yes, you can learn how to cook this rather time-consuming dish in under a minute. On TikTok, @robbiebell8 talks a quick clip while the video plays at warp speed. Everything runs perfectly well until 49 seconds in when he admits — shocker — he uses Rosemary (“I would normally use Thyme but I didn’t have any.”).

@robbiebell8

Beef Bourguignon!Slow cooker on summer for 6hrs. Try and get the best beef you can afford. #beef #slowcook #cooking #recipe #tiktokchef

♬ original sound – 🔪 Robbie Bell 🥘

Best Beef Bourguignon Recipe for Vegans

The entire video is just over a minute long and in this one, and the chef doesn’t even speak. Instead, you see the names of the ingredients flash onscreen (sadly, sans measurements). Note: The beef substitute is tempeh.

 

Jamie Oliver’s Beef Bourguignon Recipe

Jamie’s variations:

0:26 He uses beef cheeks.
5:35 He uses parchment paper instead of a proper lid (“to slowly concentrate and get thick and thicker”).
7:23 – Jamie’s idea of hell (peeling those tiny silver-skinned onions)

 

Modern Boeuf (Beef) Bourguignon Videos

Binging with Babish tackles Julia Child’s recipe in three minutes and 44 seconds. At the end, he says “Julia Child’s version completely blew my pants off.”

See: All Recipes

Cleaning Hacks for Kitchens, Bathrooms and More

This video shows you how to clean chrome surfaces, stovetops, screens, showerheads, chrome surfaces, shower glass doors & oven racks.

There’s a reason @creative_explained (Instagram) has a million followers. This guy packs lots of info into short-and-sweet video bursts. Not to mention that @jennifergarner shared one of his earlier kitchen hack videos.

In this episode, Armen Adamjan races through seven easy, organic ways to clean chrome surfaces, stovetops, screens, showerheads, chrome surfaces, shower glass doors, and oven racks. Honestly, we needed to re-play the video several times to really absorb the advice.

Materials You’ll Need
No dicey chemicals in these tips. All you need are household staples like vinegar, coffee filters, tea bags, damp cloths, baking soda, lemon juice, an iron, a ziplock bag, paper towels,  and salt.

Below we indicate where each section starts so you don’t waste even one precious second of your time.

Water rings on wood furniture
0:03

Stovetops
0:09

Screens
0:16

Descaling showerheads/sink faucets
0:23

Stains on chrome surfaces
0:33

Shower glass doors
0:40

Oven racks
0:52

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZxA220lGSZ/

 

This Is Your Brain On Food

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOOD An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More By Uma Naidoo, MD Many people focus on the way their diet affects their physical health, their figure, and the …

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN  ON FOOD
An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More

By Uma Naidoo, MD

Many people focus on the way their diet affects their physical health, their figure, and the environment. But we don’t often think about our diet’s influence on our mental state, and the consequences of this blind spot are dire. Pre-COVID statistics show that a staggering one-in-five American adults will suffer a diagnosable mental health condition in any given year, and 46 percent of Americans will meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental health condition sometime in their life.

In other words, there is an epidemic of poor mental health becoming more apparent in this country — one that could be mitigated more effectively, and even reversed, by simple changes to our diet and lifestyle.  Now, more than ever, maintaining ourselves and our loved ones in optimal mental and physical health is key.

Dr. Uma Naidoo has spent her life exploring the relationship between nutrition and mental health – and her triple-threat credentials as a psychiatrist, nutritionist, and trained chef give her a unique lens into their surprisingly intricate connection. In THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOOD (on-sale now on Amazon) she unpacks the complex ways in which food contributes to psychological wellness, offering practical – and surprising – dietary solutions for combatting a host of physical and cognitive health issues, including ADHD, depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, OCD, dementia, and many more.

Packed with cutting-edge research on more than 200 foods, nutritional recommendations, and brain-healthy recipes, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOOD is the ultimate guide to reworking your brain – by reworking your dietary choices.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Uma Naidoo, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist, professional chef, and nutrition specialist. She is currently the Director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where she consults on nutritional interventions for the psychiatrically and medically ill; Director of Nutritional Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital Academy; and founder of a private practice. She also teaches at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. She blogs for Harvard Health and Psychology Today and has just completed a unique video cooking series for the MGH Academy, which teaches nutritional psychiatry using culinary techniques in the kitchen.

 

 

 

Liz Marek Hosts the Sugar Geek Show

Liz Marek is an author and instructor who has been creating fun and creative food since 2009. She named her school “Sugar Geek Show” because of her obsessions with baking and #geekculture. Liz often combines her love for comic book characters, movies and anime into her cake creations. Her content is coming soon to The Food Channel!

Liz Marek is an author and instructor living in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Liz has been creating fun and creative food on her YouTube channel, which can be found at youtube.com/sugargeekshow, and at her online cake decorating school, found at www.sugargeekshow.com, since 2009. She named her school “Sugar Geek Show” because of her obsessions with baking and #geekculture. Liz often combines her love for comic book characters, movies and anime into her cake creations. Her content is coming soon to The Food Channel!