Predicting food trends is like writing movies for teenagers. You could try throwing together a screenplay for “Dystopian Teenage Vampire Musical,” but by the time you’re done Hollywood will be have moved on to “funny athletic mermaids save the world.”
Food predictions can either lag way behind (cronuts will be hot!) or are way too far ahead of their time (the iPhone will be able to send flavors!)
So here, we’re aiming for the middle ground. The following dishes have been around long enough to show they have legs, but are only now starting to spread. These are the five foods you can expect to eat this year.
Kombucha
My wife is happiest in the woods, never wears makeup, and plans to give birth at home, so it’s not surprising that she’s talking about kombucha. What’s surprising is that everyone else is. The “booch”, as a handful of people who probably should stop talking are calling it, is THE fermented drink of 2015.
The surprising part about this, of course, is that kombucha is tea made from a colony of bacteria and yeast. Like “oozing”, this is a description that’s bad when you hear it from your doctor but good when you hear it from your chef. Kombucha is sweet and tangy, and has probiotic compounds similar to the ones you find in yogurt.
Athletes Eat, a sports-themed health food restaurant (!) in St. Louis, Missouri (!!), is just one of many serving kombucha on tap. It’s also sold in bottles, and even gas stations are getting into the act. If tofu was this popular, soybean farmers would rule the world.
Housemade Sausage
What do you get when “farm-to-table” meets “bacon everywhere”? Artisanal sausage, a trend you can expect to see spreading in 2015 as trashy meat goes high-end. In fact, San Diego has a whole restaurant dedicated to the art: Salt & Cleaver, whose tagline of “sausage * beer * cocktails” perfectly captures the zeitgeist. Their sausage options include duck and bacon, cilantro-lime chicken, ribeye, and fried shrimp and crab.
An added bonus to this trend is that we’ll get to hear terms like “locally raised”, “free range”, and “GMO-free” applied to a food usually associated with stadium football and Oktoberfest. If you’re into highbrow comedy, this may be the only year you can show a chef a tube of fat laced with sodium and have him tell you — with a straight face — that it’s healthy.
Gourmet Toast
It happened to coffee. It happened to water. So in a way, it’s only fitting that it should happen to bread too. When something perfectly cheap and perfectly simple becomes a hot commodity, it’s never quite normal again.
I guess, in a way, it’s our fault. We get what we pay for. I talked to two girls last summer who thought drinking tap water instead of bottled was weird (if you can’t see what’s wrong with that, ask a friend born before 1980). Maybe we should have seen the toast coming when we started paying $8 for small jars of salt. Well, it’s too late now.
Toast is $4 at the Mill, one of San Francisco’s hot toast places. $4. Sure, some of these are essentially open-faced sandwiches, with spreads like avocado or homemade preserves. But others are simpler, with thick cut house bread, boutique creamery butter, and—please—I really can’t go on here.
Fair warning: they’re coming for milk next.
Macarons
Anything that shows up on Gossip Girl, at New York Fashion Week, and in my little sister’s apartment is clearly on the right track. This naturally gluten-free, brightly colored cookie sandwich is crunchy, chewy, and sweet. It’s also everywhere.
People have been writing about this trend since at least 2010. Since then, there’s been a steady stream of articles declaring that macarons are the new cupcakes. Macarons may not be new, but they’re only getting more popular. In December 2014, Chicago opened Sugar Fixe Macaron, its first shop dedicated solely to the cookie. Houston launched Bite Macarons in 2013. New York, Los Angeles, and other cities have similar businesses as well. We’ve already seen Cheetos macarons and ketchup macarons. This year, we’ll see them spreading to the masses.
Cassoulet
No one’s calling it “a paradigm shift” or “the next new thing”. You won’t see a Cassoulet and Artisanal Cocktail Food Truck Zombie Crawl on your local college campus. And yet, I’m calling cassoulet as the sleeper hit of the year.
It’s a slow-cooked French casserole made with beans and meat. The beans are cooked until soft and creamy and the meat (usually some combination of confit duck, goose, and sausage) adds a deep, rich, flavor. St. Paul, Minnesota’s Meritage serves a cassoulet, as does Chicago’s Chez Moi and the Pastiche Bistro and Wine Bar in Milwaukee.
Like that girl you’ve been friends with since grade school, cassoulet might seem old and familiar. But in reality, it’s what your heart’s been looking for all along.
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