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.
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.”