Culinary and Gastronomical Trends in 2017

How the majority is going to do grocery shopping, cooking, and eating in the upcoming days? According to those experts, main new trends are described as following.

Absolutely no waste

The 1st trend is to use up all ingredients. In other words, cooks would minimize the waste of ingredients during cooking process. There are some pioneers that lead the trends, such as a restaurant named Silo in Brighton, a coastal city where is one hour driving away from London, England. Silo is the very first restaurant in the world that has not wasted anything from ingredients during business cooking process.

This trend is totally in the contrary with the fact that restaurants are the biggest industry of wasting. To make it happen, Silo restaurant has replaced modern techniques by traditional methods and organic ingredients. For examples, Silo’s cakes are made from 100% organic flour, and cream is from organic milk, which is originally from pasture breeding cows.

Jenny Dawson and Rubies in the Rubble jams, which were made from wasted fruits.

In the similarity, some factories have been maximizing their ingredients’ usage, like Rubies in the Rubble in England. It’s specialized in processed food as jams, dipping, and sauces from wasted fruits that are not qualified to be displayed and sold in stores. Ms Jenny Dawson, the company’s founder, had come up with that idea when she was walking through produce markets in London. The idea is to use up all wasted fruits and vegetables, which are not nice looking but still good and fresh, like mangoes, blueberries, tomatoes, or peppers and process them to canned products. Rubies in the Rubble products are very popular in England and many other countries because they’re quite affordable yet as qualified as other ranged brands.

Following social networks

In 2016, a national-wide survey in England of BBC Good Food showed that there is 40% the Millennial generation (a term to define people from age 18 – 35, freshman/ graduated/employed, who had grown up with social networks) that always post what they have had or what they have cooked on social networks as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Catching this trend, restaurants and food companies have created catchy products, such as rainbow baguette, black hamburger, or seaweed coffee, which are weird or fancy looking to attract the Millennial generation.

New favorite black hamburgers

Good food posted on Instagram.

Smart techniques in the kitchen

Smart pans which can help to cook diverse dishes because of its connection to smart phones are an example of modern kitchen techniques. Other examples are tea maker called Totali-Tea which can calculate the amount of teas, brew, and press (both tea leaves or tea bags) to make the best cup of tea; the Coravin wine preserver system which allows users to suck wine out of bottles with no needs of opening the corks; or IKAWA coffee toasters controlled by iPad.

Alcohol-free drinks

Recently socialistic researches have revealed that Z generation (a term to define people who were born after 1995, estimating about 2 billions of the world population) drinks less beer and wine than older generation and they evaluate quality of canned drinks through daily drinks. They predicted that non-alcohol drinks would dominate the market next year, especially healthy nourishing drinks, such as activated carbon-filtered pure water or cold-pressed juice (refers to juice that uses a hydraulic press to extract juice from fruits and vegetables, in order to preserve the whole purity and nutrition from produce).

Mocktail – non-alcohol mixture drinks are popular choice of Z generation.

Besides, there are several types of non-alcohol wines, such as Seedlip, which is distilled from six kinds of plants around the world, or mocktail - concocted cocktails without alcohol background coloring and flavoring addictive. Usually, they just use fresh fruits, fresh milk, tea, coffee, eggnog, or canned drinks to mix.

To have seaweed

In recent years, the planet has witnessed the outburst of vegetarian cuisine or vegan (absolutely no use of animal products like eggs or leather). The needs of vegetable has been significantly increasing so much that can lead to green ingredients’ shortage. Therefore, an enormous green source has been farmed, raised, and exploited from the oceans, which is seaweed. This clean type of vegetables is also the alternative of sea salt and other ingredients. Japan is the very first country where popularly uses seaweed in daily meals and this trend is expanding to the entire world.

Seaweed (nori) is in daily meals of the Japanese and expanding to the world.

Nowadays, nori can be found in most food stores and supermarkets in all over the world. Seaweed is used to make sushi, ramen noodles, salads, or simply cooked with rice. The most common type of seaweed that we can find is dried, pressed in thin squares. Seaweed contains high nutrition and vitamin and its protein is much higher than wheat’s so it’s perfectly great for vegetarian.

Pickled food and fermented drinks

New culinary trends also honors gut-healthy food and that’s the reason pickled or fermented food and drinks have become more favorite. Korean traditional kimchee, Yucatan pickles from Mexico (scallions, daikon, or jalapenos), or kombucha - a variety of fermented, lightly effervescent sweetened black or green tea drinks – are vibrant examples of gourmets’ choices.

Yucatan sour scallions.

Insects

The idea of using insects as a source of protein originated long time ago and it became real in several famous restaurants but just in recent years, it has become one of new trends and needs. They’ve used insects in pancakes and sold cleaned insects in food stores. One viral example is the mobile food store chain Miers’ Wahaca in England, which has been well known by its Mexican street food now is selling food made from insects.

Chef Thomasina Jean “Tommi” Miers (born 1976), who won the Master Chefs of BBC Culinary Channel in 2005, is one of pioneers using insects. He might not know having those leggy buddies have just become an important culinary trend of 2017 and later.

Writer: Luu Huong/Doanhnhancuoituan

Translator: Thu Pham