TikTok's latest food trend is an obsession with...onions?
You've never quite sure what food TikTok is going to obsess over next. One month it's cottage cheese in everything, the next it's a dense bean salad.
Right now TikTok is really into — of all things — onions. Most notably lots of folks are cooking a dish colloquially dubbed an "onion boil," which is effectively all the things you'd see in a seafood boil — lots of butter and seasoning — stuffed inside an onion.
Videos of folks making onion boils have racked up millions of views. And it really is as simple as I wrote earlier: You core an onion, stuff it with butter, and season it to all hell. Then it is baked in foil for a bit and served. This TikTok from @stephpappas, for instance, racked up nearly 10 million views.
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Or here's another from @thishealthytable that has some 3 million views.
To be honest — and this is my opinion — they kind of look like soggy gut bombs. But I imagine onion plus butter plus seasoning served over a starch — let's say rice — would be tasty.
Lots of folks in the comments of viral TikToks have pointed out onion boils are quite similar to a dish called a dolma, which is basically a stuffed onion. But the onion boils are quite simplified, relying only on butter and seasoning. But, because onions are in via the boil recipe, you can see folks basically doing a true dolma recipe and going viral as well.
So it's not just one onion recipe going viral — you might even say this trend has ... "layers."
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
