TikTok recipes make me drool.
At Insider, my job is to write about social media trends and online communities, so I spend a lot of time on TikTok, scrolling past gorgeous-looking recipe videos that I would absolutely love to make.
More often than not on any given day, I'll see a mouthwatering recipe on my TikTok feed, like it or add it to my favorites so I can make it myself later, and then realize I simply cannot be bothered to try it by the time it gets to dinner, deciding to opt for my go-to basic pasta dish that I always make when I'm feeling lazy.
But one genre of cooking video I've seen on the platform more recently is "20-minute recipes," which promise delicious and high-quality results with minimal effort. Many creators posting such videos have talked about how these recipes have helped them save time throughout the week and have now become part of their regular cooking repertoires, so I decided to put those claims to the test.
I allocated a whole day to living on viral 20-minute recipes — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — to see if they were actually as time-saving and easy to make as they looked in the short, neatly-presented TikToks on my feed.
While I did find that some of the recipes contained useful time-saving hacks for cutting down long cooking processes, I couldn't complete any of them in the suggested 20-minute time frame.
I don't think any of the creators behind these recipes were trying to be deliberately misleading, but I do think this has been a vital lesson in learning that there's a difference between things as seen on social media and in real life.