What Happened to the Viral Recipe?
Editors and recipe developers weigh in on how TikTok has changed recipe virality.
In 2012, Alexandra Stafford published her mom’s long-guarded peasant bread recipe on her blog. The recipe is a simple, beginner-friendly bread loaf that gets baked directly in buttered Pyrex bowls, yielding pleasingly round loaves.
“It started blowing up almost immediately,” she tells me. In the years following, it racked up an estimated 12 million views, got ripped off by Martha Stewart in an Instagram Reel (Instagram commenters called her in until she credited and tagged Stafford in an edited caption), and has been one of the top five recipes on Stafford’s blog ever since.
Stafford’s experience hearkens back to a time when recipe developers could set out to create a clever, original recipe that solved a few problems for home cooks, with the hope that it just might create a traffic windfall. In the years following, we saw the viral recipe gods bless Alison Roman’s “The Stew,” Priya Krishna’s saag feta, and Sarah Jampel’s no-knead focaccia (which inspired this memorable Reductress headline in the throes of Covid lockdown).
