What Makes a TikTok Recipe?
A conversation with Fran Magazine's Fran Hoepfner about FoodTok.
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This spring I got wind of a cookbook called As Cooked On TikTok, which is exactly what you expect it to be: a piece of marketing material that includes recipes and QR codes that link you to an app where you will inevitably spend three hours scrolling. There are the classic spins on tradition (butter chicken pasta); cheese pulls (korean corn cheese); twee shit (the garishly inefficient “pancake cereal”); a really delicious looking chilaquiles recipe; and plenty of hacks, like a “pesto egg,” which I did try. It was fine, but left me asking: why not just eat a fried egg with pesto on toast?1 (The answer of course is that it makes for less appealing video content.)
I’ve always wondered whether and how the app2 inspires people to cook, and what sort of food its algorithm promotes. So I called up my friend Fran Hoepfner—EIC of Fran Magazine, home cook, and casual TikTok user—to figure out what defines the TikTok recipe genre and what home cooks can actually learn from these videos.
MB: Fran. What’s the last thing you cooked from TikTok?
FH: The last thing I made from a TikTok recipe was probably about a month ago. I made Cafe Hailee’s all-green pasta salad. It was just a sort of a classic pasta salad recipe, but all the things you added to it were green. Green bell pepper, snap peas, artichoke hearts, green olives, very green forward.
Was it good?
I thought it was amazing. It's really feeling like a pasta salad summer for me. It's something I can make in bulk that lasts all week. So I've been hounding pasta salad recipes in general. I often feel like a pasta salad recipe is kind of a garbage salad. It's a real “whatever you have” thing.
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How often do you actually cook a recipe from TikTok?
It depends: is the recipe coming from a TikTok-specific creator, or is New York Times Cooking doing a video of a recipe I put in my recipe box like three months ago and I'm like, oh yeah, I should cook that? But from a TikTok creator, let's say once every four to six weeks.
I’ve found the UX is sort of clunky: you’re watching a video on TikTok and then do you transcribe it or do you just hold it in your head? A lot of them are like, get the whole recipe on my Instagram. There’s a lot of switching between platforms.
With that Café Hailee recipe specifically, she's got a personal website, so it was just like, the whole recipe is up on my website. But for some others, I will screenshot the ingredients list and then usually just watch it enough times where I feel like I have a basic understanding of what it is. But you’re right, there's not really a great methodology.
I've been trying to figure out the different categories of TikTok recipes. The way I see it, they can all be divided into: Process-based; ASMR; personality, where the person is like, “I’m doing a bit!”; and aspirational, where you’re never going to make the thing but it’s amazing to watch. Do you feel like there are any other categories you see?
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you want to get into this in Mess Hall, but I also think there's a style of recipe that is straight up just recipes for people with eating disorders.
No, I've been thinking about that a lot.
So there's the ones where I'm like, well, this looks disgusting. This is not how anyone I know actually cooks or thinks about food, you know?
For two seconds on TikTok, it became very popular for girls to—I mean, some of this is under the guise of IBS—but they were just drinking water with chia seeds and lemon and just kind of chugging it. Like, “it doesn't taste very good, but if you drink it first thing in the morning, you're gonna feel good the rest of the day.”
Right. It's like Epicac for 2022.
Yeah, exactly. And I think you get effective versions of that type of thing and not effective versions, which is that you get stuff where I'm like, okay, if I put that in my body, I guess it will have the intended result of giving me intentional food poisoning.
But you sent me that video of that hyper-dense smoothie. I get smoothie stuff all the time on TikTok. And a lot of smoothies on TikTok—god love 'em, I sure do love to drink 'em—they're milkshakes. That's not for anyone's health. Which is totally fine! But I see a lot of stuff that's claiming health and I'm just like, This is candy. That's okay, but this is candy.
I've been trying to figure out what the “TikTok” genre of recipe is. What kind of recipe does well on the app?
Hmm. What does do well? Something with ingredients that people have in their home right now is always gonna do well. I think something with not a lot of speaking in it, hence the popularity of an Emily Mariko type. I think people like her videos because she doesn't talk. And perhaps it is unfair to say, but I think an Emily Mariko video kind of loses something when you hear her talking.
I was actually gonna ask you about what you thought about the voice reveal. I hated it!
Do you hate the sound of her voice?
It's it's not that I hate the sound of her voice, it's that I don't wanna listen to it.
Yeah. There's no desire to hear her speak. And nothing she's doing is so complicated that I need her to explain why she's doing it.
She’s a mime!
She's getting kind of owned right now, actually, for a really grotesque-looking lemon pasta that she made. I don't know if you caught this—she put squeezed halves of lemons into the pasta and everyone was like, you can't eat those! Why are those going in there?
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She is probably the figure in media I have the most unhealthy relationship with. Because there's no language of her explaining her logic I'm like, well, she's the most compelling person who's ever lived.
It’s funny, because Café Hailee started out with this kind of silent mime-core routine. And she has slowly pivoted to language. And I think it's been a huge benefit to her, even though I find her a little didactic: Her recipes are a little complicated and there are reasons that she's doing things in a certain way. There's a reason why the onions are being diced instead of sliced. And Mariko is always just putting chopped vegetables and meat in the oven or whatever. There’s no need to explain that to me.
Did you ever watch Buzzfeed tasty videos?
No, but I knew about them.
I think a lot of food on TikTok is sort of like an evolved version of a BuzzFeed Tasty video. It’s kind of like stoner concept food. I saw a video today that was like, make pizza balls in the air fryer. And I was just like, yeah, of course I’d wanna eat that. But I don’t know if anyone actually makes these things.
I know I'm certainly spending most of my time watching TikTok while I'm stoned. Like a lot of the times I'm just liking something because it looks good and then I'll go back through it and I'll be like, well I'm never gonna make this. But there are things that have entered my general recipe repertoire because they are something I initially saw in TikTok.
There is a three-cup tofu recipe that I actually think I sent you at one point.
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We made it in Beverly!
Oh yeah. Sort of a braised tofu that I make all the time. I actually have to credit TikTok for getting me into carrots, which sounds kind of crazy, but I was a longtime carrot skeptic. And I think I learned a lot about roasting carrot fries and how to season carrots. There's a carrot fry recipe from a creator I would say I absolutely loathe but it's like, I make that all the time.
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For a while there was a decadent oatmeal girl that I really loved. And if I felt like doing something fancy on the weekend, I would make baked oatmeal. It's like eating cake. It feels like a cheat. I understand why they're so crazy about it.
Yeah. And I think that a lot of TikTok recipes are about some sort of transformation, right? Like the baked feta pasta—it’s sort of these dramatic transformations of ingredients. Or that scary cloud bread thing, which is basically a children’s science experiment.
There are also periods of time on TikTok where people get really obsessed with roasting a vegetable and then puréeing it with starchy pasta water, and making that into a kind of sauce. Like the kale pasta sauce in New York Times Cooking.
But then people are doing with beets and with carrots and all these things. And it becomes an aesthetic thing. Presumably if you are watching enough of these and you have a home cook’s mind, you're like, yeah, you can make a sauce out of whatever. Whereas I think people on TikTok are like, “How To Make a Pink Sauce.” Not to be confused with Pink Sauce. But it’s about: How do you make something that looks crazy?
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Right, the sauce becomes a meme. Do you feel like there's like a difference between the foods that attract you on TikTok versus foods that would attract you in an actual cookbook?
I do think the fun of TikTok is like the surprise element of it that you like log onto that app and you have no idea what you’re gonna see. It could be terrible. You have good scroll nights on TikTok and you have bad scroll nights on TikTok and that's just the devil's bargain you make with it. And the second I have a book in my possession, I already know what's in that book. That's not as fun for me.
If you were gonna start a food account on TikTok, what would it be?
Oh, Phil wants me to do this so bad. I’m like, you don't want to have a viral girlfriend. I'd probably go Mariko mode. It doesn't necessarily bring me joy to say that, but I think if I'm just being honest about my own abilities, that is where I would excel.
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Another quibble with this recipe is that it risks burning the garlic in your pesto!
I should note here that I downloaded TikTok for a few weeks in 2020 but had to delete it after I began spending 2-3 hours of each day scrolling. Congrats to any person who has ever had a healthy relationship to a social media app.