5 Exciting 2025 Food Trends to Spice Up Your Cooking Routine
If you have plans to start a cookbook club or spend an entire Saturday baking (or both!), then congratulations! You’re totally on trend for 2025. To be specific, you’re right in line with the predictions that nine food experts recently shared with The Kitchn editors.
Every new year comes with new “it” flavors — hello, passion fruit, pistachio, ube! — and cooking trends. With a few months of this year already behind us, we spoke with cookbook authors, recipe developers, and creators to dig into The State of Home Cooking in 2025 — particularly what flavors and trends are on the rise, and how you as a home cook might see them show up in your own kitchen.
While these trends of course don’t have to dictate the way you eat, having fun with a trend is one of the quickest ways to get inspired in the kitchen. Here are the five food trends experts say will reach mega-status in 2025.
Themed Anti-Dinner Parties
Don’t let the name fool you — people are hosting and attending gatherings, but less so the lavish soirées that require a painstaking amount of preparation. “It doesn’t need to be a big, huge, massive, fancy thing with your finest china and five courses or whatever,” explains Molly Yeh, cook, recipe developer, and author of Sweet Farm!
This version of the dinner party is all about picking a theme — from a cookbook party to a soup swap — and making the prep, party, and recipes themselves a casual, low-effort affair. “I think that the trend is going to be gathering but making simpler meals,” says Jeanine Donofrio, creator of Love & Lemons and author of Simple Feel Good Food.
These less fussy get-togethers keep the community aspect of a dinner party, but majorly cut down on hosting duties. Take a cookbook club, for example: “Everybody has to bring a dish from the cookbook, and you’re celebrating that author and you’re celebrating the cookbook,” explains Diane Morissey, recipe developer and author of You Got This! Yeh shares how this potluck-style approach works with her own cookbook club: “I host most months, but knowing that I only am responsible for one dish is such a nice relief,” she says.
Recipe developer Arlyn Osborne, author of Sugarcane, predicts that the warmer months will invite even more specific produce-centered themes. “There’s probably going to be ramp-inspired dinners or tomato parties,” she says. Going all-in on a theme gives you endless possibilities to make it your own. “It’s creative, and people are looking to do more creative things like that,” Morissey says.
Easy 1-Ingredient Dinner Upgrades
A well-stocked pantry is the key to leveling up almost any dish, and experts are seeing home cooks especially excited about flavorful additions — or, more specifically, just one super-flavorful addition — that make a huge impact. “I am a big proponent of cool sauces or using a great sauce and tying it into your meal,” Morissey says. She adds that one condiment, like romesco, tzatziki, or gochujang, can elevate a “basic recipe” to something “fabulous.”
Remixing your go-to meals with a new-to-you ingredient or spice can also quickly get you out of a cooking rut. Donofrio loves using “condiments that add a pop of flavor, like kimchi, capers, and pickled onions.” Yeh shares her go-tos as well: “I’m all about the furikake and the hot sauces. Chili crisp, I love, and just simple things like a drizzle of vinegar is going to bring things to life,” she says.
Speaking of vinegar, Zaynab Issa, recipe developer and author of Third Culture Cooking, has noticed more unique takes on this cooking staple hitting store shelves, like celery vinegar and persimmon vinegar. “When you swap out regular vinegar for one of these more interesting ones, you get a different flavor, and it feels fresh and exciting,” she explains.
Yasmin Fahr, recipe developer and author of Cook Simply, Live Fully, hypes the benefit of combining flavors from different cuisines when you add a new-to-you ingredient to things like soups and marinades. “[I] use condiments or ingredients like miso or ones from other cuisines in kind of an everyday American food. I do that a lot with my recipes,” she says. (You can take big swings as you experiment, too — Fahr once took a Thanksgiving classic, turkey, and leveled it up with a miso butter.)
If you’re looking for a recipe to get started on your “flavor pop” journey, Joanne and Adam Gallagher, the creators of Inspired Taste, share how they’re flavoring chicken wings with berbere spice, an Ethiopian staple. “It’s got this really potent curry flavor with a pretty intense spice, but it’s like a sweet spice,” Joanne explains. “We combine maple syrup and the spice together, and it makes this sweet and spicy chicken wing.”
Gettin’ Scrappy
Even as groceries have gotten more expensive, the majority of home cooks don’t have strict grocery budgets, according to a February 2025 The Kitchn survey. Still, people are looking for ways to save a little money — and experts predict home cooks will use groceries in new, more creative ways to get the most out of what they paid for.
One example, from Yeh: “I keep a bag of scraps in my freezer that I use to make stock.” She tosses things like carrot and onion scraps and chicken bones in a freezer-safe bag. “Usually it’s my Sunday routine to just dump the Ziploc out into a big pot and make stock, and then I have frozen stock in my freezer,” Yeh shares, adding that it’s an easy way to use up all of your groceries. Donofrio is all for freezing food you might’ve been inclined to throw away, like the tops of fennel and leeks. (The Kitchn editors also love this trick, and do it themselves at home.)
You can even freeze things like leftover egg yolks to fully lean into the “no grocery left behind” mindset.
Preserving leftovers isn’t your only option for using up groceries, though — you can also revive sad-looking produce into something delicious. Donofrio describes a “yummy stir-fry” she whipped up with leftover celery, chili crisp, and noodles — and she emphasizes that cooking with what you have is a simple way to save money. “It was like this meal was kind of free because I probably wasn’t going to use those four stalks of celery before they wilted anyway,” Donofrio explains.
Joanne says that her readers love making something totally new with common leftover ingredients. “We did a carrot pasta, so it’s like a mac and cheese, but instead of a cream sauce or a cheesy sauce, it’s a carrot sauce,” she says. “I would love to see people really being able to go into their fridge and feel more comfortable with the leftover ingredients from the last recipe and reusing them,” she adds.
Tea for Dessert (but Not in Your Cup)
Putting a twist on a mainstay, like tea, is pretty much a foolproof way to start a food trend. “I noticed there’s an uptake of tea-infused recipes, and I think there’s a general global matcha craze,” Issa says. “I feel like matcha has been budding, and now [I’m] just seeing tea being applied to desserts,” Issa explains, adding that she noticed matcha cookies popping at the end of last year.
Recipe developer Arlyn Osborne, author of Sugarcane, is also seeing tea pop up as an ingredient in different foods, providing new, exciting ways to enjoy the flavors she’s used to sipping. Osborne says she noticed it at the 2025 Winter Fancy Food Show, a trade show that highlights innovative flavors and products. “I saw Thai iced tea-flavored mochi,” she says. Other tea-infused confections at the show included matcha popcorn and matcha caramel macarons.
Of course, it’s not a brand-new phenomenon to add tea flavors to your food — just look at Taylor Swift’s chai cookies that trend every December — but definitely expect to have more opportunities to amp up a recipe with new tea flavors in the coming months. Issa believes you may even see more tea-infused dishes in general: “All applications of it, both savory and sweet.”
A Baking Comeback
As people’s lives got busier in the five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, their days spent making homemade sourdough became few and far between. However, experts say there’s a shift happening where home cooks are now setting aside time on weekends or on less busy days to enjoy a hands-on hobby in the kitchen.
“I think everything is moving so fast, and the inverse reaction of that is people just want simple and slow and they’re craving more personal time,” Issa explains. She says that “being unplugged and not being on your phone or computer is really the epitome of luxury,” and that baking is a good way to do that. “I think it’s more so chasing a feeling of, ‘I could spend four hours baking and being slow,’” Issa says. We saw this trend start to rise even last year, when some of The Kitchn’s most popular recipes were elaborate desserts like the almond-crusted Bee Sting Cake and the filled, layered Ding Dong Cake.
If you want to bake something that’s overflowing with nostalgia and easy to share, Eric King, recipe developer, food photographer, and creator of easygayoven, predicts there could be a renaissance of a specific dessert — although he caveats it might be wishful thinking. “I think we went through a phase, obviously in the late 2000s with the Sex and the City and the Georgetown Cupcakes of it all … I have this feeling that since the trend cycles just keep speeding up, that we’re just going to go back into a cupcake trend cycle,” he shares.
No matter what you make, King believes people want a creative outlet. “I think elaborate baking projects or baking projects in general aren’t going anywhere,” he says.
Further Reading
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