The hot trend on Instagram (and not just): one-meal meal

You know this picture - brown roasted vegetables, with a touch of green herbs, sometimes even joined by chicken or fish, perfectly placed on a metal tray covered with baking paper, so how does it suddenly become the fiery trend of the era?

Practical and beautiful, one-meal meal

One-meal meal (Photo: ShutterStock, ShutterStock)

In recent years, cooking in a single format has conquered the world by storm, EATER Internet magazine this week declared excitedly. You know these recipes, relatives of cooking in one pot, the simple idea and use is the basic means that every amateur cook has in the house - a metal mold and a baking oven.

The beauty of these recipes is that they can include everything you want in the template, the options are varied, it's convenient, not dirty with a lot of tools, has a large interior space, and most importantly - one of the hallmarks of these recipes - is stacking everything on one template, and you'll soon have dinner.

According to EATER, one of the first recipes of a single-meal meal was published in the New York Times in 2009 by Melissa Clark - a recipe for shrimp and broccoli in the pattern. At that point, no emphasis was placed on the issue of the single mold, only a few years later Clark joined the wave, adding "If you have a baking dish you can make super delicious meals for your family in the oven all at once, with minimal preparation, and quite a few dishes to wash."

One-course meal: Chicken with sweet potato in the oven

One pattern, that's the whole story

One-meal meal (Photo: ShutterStock, ShutterStock)

So when did it become an issue?

"It's not before that people haven't cooked supplements and vegetables in molds," he told EATER food photographer Matt Armandriz "but as soon as bloggers branded it as one-meal dinners - it exploded." Armandriz said he began to notice that the trend was gaining momentum three or four years ago. And he's not that far off.

Google Trends shows that searches for one-pattern dinners, or one-size-fits-all cooking began to gain momentum in March 2017. Cecilia Jenkins, editor of Cooks Illustrated food magazine, notes that the magazine created a section dedicated to cooking in one format as early as 2015 due to a keen demand from Readers. Jenkins says creating the section was an organic response to requests like "I have a small kitchen, I don't have a dishwasher, and I don't want to spend a lot of time washing dishes."

Not surprisingly, if you are trending on the Internet, it is not difficult to detect an upward trend in recipes that require simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-use raw materials. Here, just last week, we published our most popular recipes for searches - guess what they all have in common.

Google searches for recipes in one format usually include repetitive words like simple, fast, healthy, family-friendly, easy, accessible, mess-free, magic, hassle-free, light-hearted, midweek and busy brews.

Fish and vegetables in one pattern

One-meal meal (Photo: ShutterStock, ShutterStock)

So what's the matter with Instagram?

Like many other things, part of the rise in the single-pattern cooking phenomenon can be blamed on Instagram and food photography: It is a particularly friendly cooking technique for food photography, thanks to the flat and convenient format of photography. Although quite a banal picture, it is beautiful and simple to shoot even with a sophisticated phone camera. No need to look for the angle - right angle from above just above the mold will do the job, and that's it - welcome to flutter according to your personal taste.

"Cooking in one pattern creates a great photo shoot because all the food is in one plane," says photographer Armandreise. "You don't have to worry about exposure or focus. The cooking process can produce an appealing image - you don't have to do styling or mess with what came out." In the pot, which is a little more difficult to photograph), of course, the ease of cooking is what's attractive, and the aesthetic is a bonus.

Immediately after Instagram and other social media popular with homeowners like Pinterest, one template recipe soon entered blogs, magazines, newspapers, and even launched, mostly overseas, cookbooks with the idea of ​​one object. The number of searches began in January 2017, and since then On the rise, says data manager at Pinterest, she said searches for single-pattern recipes grew 159 percent from January 2017 to January 2019.

So even though the talk of social network shallowness continues into 2020, sometimes good things come out. Want too? Here are some recipes that you can apply with the hottest cooking technique of the time, don't forget to take a photo.

Whole Chicken with Vegetable Fan (Photo: Amir Menachem, styling: Noa Kenrick)

A whole chicken recipe with a vegetable fan

A recipe for filet is removed with one-off antipasti

Recipe for poppies and vegetables in one mold

A recipe for glazed root vegetables in one mold