TikTok popularizes rice-paper fish & chips
- Taste of Home and TikTok creators helped push rice-paper fish and chips into wider circulation in early 2026, turning a 2023 video into a fresh air-fryer trend. - Taste of Home’s January 20 recipe uses 4 cod fillets, 4 rice-paper sheets and a 15-minute 400-degree air-fry to mimic battered fish. - Restaurants are already mining TikTok for menu ideas, from hybrid pastries to drinks and texture-driven snacks. (restaurantbusinessonline.com)
Rice-paper fish and chips has resurfaced as a TikTok cooking trend, with creators and food publishers recasting the wrapper as a crisp stand-in for batter. (tasteofhome.com) (tiktok.com) The basic trick is simple: soften rice paper in a seasoned egg wash, wrap it around cod, then air-fry it until the outside blisters and turns golden. Taste of Home published that version on January 20, 2026. (tasteofhome.com) In Taste of Home’s test kitchen version, 4 cod fillets and 4 sheets of rice paper cook at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 minutes, then 3 minutes more after flipping. The outlet pitched it as a less messy alternative to beer batter and a gluten-free swap for standard breading. (tasteofhome.com) The format is older than this month’s attention cycle. A TikTok from creator @crazykoreancooking posted on May 27, 2023 showed “rice paper fish chips” and had 49.5K likes when surfaced in search results this week. (tiktok.com) What changed in 2026 is the way food publishers started packaging the hack for mainstream home cooks. Taste of Home folded the dish into a broader run of rice-paper recipes in March, alongside dumplings and chips built around the same crisp-chewy texture. (tasteofhome.com 1) (tasteofhome.com 2) (tasteofhome.com 3) That puts the dish inside a bigger social-media food cycle: familiar comfort food, a shortcut ingredient, and an air fryer. Nation’s Restaurant News said in January that “new textures” were among the food ideas creators expected to resonate in 2026. (nrn.com) Restaurant operators are watching the same pipeline. Restaurant Business wrote on March 17 that chains and menu developers were trying to get ahead of TikTok- and Instagram-born crazes after missing earlier hits such as Dubai chocolate. (restaurantbusinessonline.com) Rice-paper fish and chips fits that formula neatly: a recognizable British-style dish rebuilt with a pantry item more often used for spring rolls. The result looks close enough to battered fish for the camera, but cooks in an air fryer with fewer steps. (tasteofhome.com) (allrecipes.com) For now, the trend is less about a single breakout creator than about a repeatable kitchen hack that publishers can test, photograph and standardize. That is usually how a TikTok food idea moves from a niche video into the broader home-cooking feed. (tiktok.com) (tasteofhome.com)
