These 5 Viral TikTok Cooking Hacks and Recipes Aren’t Actually Good

As a former social media editor, employee at a food media publication, and Gen Z-er, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at food videos on TikTok and Instagram. Many of these have introduced me to my favorite new food personalities — like Hailee Catalano, known for her beach sandwiches and adept use of seasonal produce, or fruit peeling expert and founder of Fysh Foods Zoya Biglary — and dishes that are now an integral part of my regular rotation (hello, lasagna soup). 

But for every hack, recipe, or creator I love, there’s inevitably a video that riles me up by teaching and promoting cooking techniques that simply won’t work well. These are just a few of the trending foods and cooking hacks that I’ve witnessed in the past few years, which might sound delicious at first, but I recommend immediately swiping past.

Pesto eggs

In terms of flavor profile, pesto and eggs are a match made in heaven. But actually frying your eggs in pesto? Not such a good idea. This method has been around since at least 2021, and calls for you to add pesto to a frying pan, and then directly fry your eggs in it. 

The problem with this is that pesto is made of tender herbs, which will quickly turn brown, wilt, and lose some of their potency of flavor when cooked. This is why pesto is a no-cook sauce! So next time you’re whipping up eggs on toast, just add the pesto on top to finish.

One-pot pastas… in the oven

I’m very on board with one-pot pastas, and generally anything that makes dinner cleanup easier. But what I refuse to do is dump a pack of raw spaghetti and a quart of chicken broth or water into a casserole dish and stick it in the oven — a technique that I’m unfortunately seeing increasingly often on the internet. This is guaranteed to yield unevenly cooked pasta; and by the time you’ve baked it long enough to ensure no noodles are crunchy and raw, the others will be turning to mush.

Cottage cheese ice cream

I don’t know how we’ve arrived at the point that I need to explain this, but blending cottage cheese and putting it in the freezer does not make ice cream. Typical ice cream stays scoopable and has a luscious texture when frozen for a few reasons, including: churning the ice cream as it freezes prevents large ice crystals from forming and incorporates air, while the high sugar content lowers the mixture’s freezing temperature. 

When you skip out on the churning process, and also use a blender to break down the curds of cottage cheese into micro pieces, you’ll end up with something that’s similar to ice cream but has a more icy and slightly grainy texture, as one of my favorite content creators Emmymade demonstrates:

Miniature fried eggs

This hack first appeared on TikTok a few years ago, but keeps popping up on my feed. It calls for freezing a raw egg, peeling the shell off of the frozen egg, and then slicing it crosswise into icy rounds that look like miniature fried eggs. You then place the raw, frozen slices of egg in a hot skillet, allowing them to simultaneously thaw and cook. This might look cute, but there’s a laundry list of reasons you shouldn’t try it.

To start, the FDA recommends against freezing eggs in their shells, because it increases the likelihood of Salmonella or other bacterial contamination. Cooking the eggs directly from frozen also risks leaving parts of them undercooked. And finally, slicing a round, icy, and slippery egg is a recipe for a knife slip disaster. Luckily other social media users are often quick to comment on these videos, pointing out that the hack is dangerous, especially for serving to children — but since it’s still part of my algorithm some two years later, I hope this helps dissuade more people from trying it.

Baked feta pasta

I’m begging the internet not to come for me, and this one might be partially a matter of taste, but the baked feta pasta that’s had a hold over popular food culture since 2019 is not the proper or best way to make a creamy pasta sauce. There are two primary issues with baking a large block of feta and then swirling pasta directly into it. First, feta is a cheese that’s stored in a brine, a solution of salt and water. So when this cheese is the only ingredient in your pasta sauce, the flavor coating the noodles will be overwhelmingly salty and tangy, which gets old after a few bites. 

Because of feta’s high water content, it also doesn’t melt smoothly, and you’ll likely end up with a grainy sauce with chunks of cheese, instead of something smooth and silky. You can reduce this graininess by using a high-quality feta, which will have a higher fat content, but it’s probably better to just make a proper cheese sauce in the first place.