By definition, cult foods belong to a time or a place or a subcult that makes them hard to get hold of. It can take a while, typically a decade or two, for a popular street food to make it onto supermarket shelves, but when we taste something really good we inevitably want more of it. Hopefully, independent shops and big retailers then respond to our hunger.
Is this always a good thing? Adapting foods for mass production has its problems and the results are not always strictly authentic, but being able to order frozen bao or pasteis de nata or a bubble tea kit with your weekly shop can make venturing out for one every so often even more special.
1. Bao
These steamed, fluffy buns are a Taiwanese staple and have long been available in the UK if you knew which kind of restaurant to look in. After they became a popular street food purchase, bao quickly entered the mainstream and are today available in all the major supermarkets, as well as through hundreds of shops and delivery services. They’ve even popped up on Wetherspoons’ menus.
Open bao buns work like a sandwich wrap or burger bun and can be filled with anything once cooked, while the closed buns are steamed with the filling inside. London mini-chain BAO has evolved from a stall to a lifestyle since 2012. It opened its first restaurant in 2015 majoring on gua bao, the most popular braised pork bao, and now has six branches across the city and sells options including beef short rib, squid tentacles on a toasted sesame bao, and deep-fried Horlicks ice cream.
Sainsbury’s was the first UK supermarket to stock bao buns, in 2017. When it included them in the 2023 Christmas range, they sold out before Christmas Eve. M&S sells 475,000 bao buns a year and Tesco sells ten kinds of frozen, sweet and savoury baozi, as they’re also known.
According to Mintel, we’re beginning to see them as a fusion option, too, with 44 per cent of burger consumers saying they’d try a bao bun burger. They’ve been on the menu at Wagamama for a decade, and have shown incredible growth in the past five years, with sales increasing by 133 per cent each month.
“I love how versatile steamed buns can be – you can pretty much pop any protein or veg inside and you’ve got a delicious dinner,” says Zoe Simons, senior innovation chef at Waitrose. “They’re also a perfect dish to use up leftovers. This summer I’ll be using our fluffy Japan Menyū Ready to Fill Steamed Buns with any leftover chicken from our weekend barbecue, adding in some crunchy slaw along with some tangy pickles.”
2. Smashburgers
The smashburger is pegged as the BBQ product of summer 2024. “Smash burgers are a massive BBQ trend for this summer, and burger joint-style smash burgers have gone viral on social media in the past few months,” says a spokesperson for Asda, which has just launched its own label smashburgers.
Asda has seen the trending product flying off shelves since launch in early April. It’s sold 672,000 in total, and smashburgers have climbed to become the retailer’s number one bestselling new summer product in meat, fish and poultry. “This transatlantic trend has taken the UK by storm,” says Waitrose innovation manager Lizzie Haywood. “We have been blown away by the positive customer response to our smash burgers with bone marrow which we recently launched in our summer range. Sales are up 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone.”
When does a burger become a smashburger? We’ve been watching these meat patties hit the grill on cult US food television such as Man v. Food for fifteen years, but the word ‘smashburger’ has only crept into our lexicon recently.
A smashburger is made from minced meat, usually beef, just like any other burger, but is rolled into a rough ball and quickly flattened – or ‘smashed’ – when it hits the fatty griddle, forcing the fat, meat and heat together and allowing the fat to circulate around the burger’s surface, settling into the must-have charred crust of any smashburger worth its salt.
The US burger chain Smashburger opened quietly here in 2016 and has been steadily growing, with seven locations of a promised 30+, and many other chains are offering a version.
There’s even a health spin to the smashburger, as it’s technically much smaller than a thick beef patty – but once you stack two or three up in a bun with a blanket of melted cheese, I’m not sure this theory holds.
3. Bubble tea
Less a soft drink than a cultural movement, bubble tea is a tea-based drink originally from Taiwan that has exploded onto our high streets thanks to the many thousands of bubble tea cafés opening up across the UK, and the candy-coloured allure they hold for teens, tweens and Gen-Z.
The bubbles are known as boba, which means balls in Cantonese. While traditional boba are made from starchy tapioca pearls, which are pleasantly chewy, it’s the lighter popping ‘boba’ that have caught attentions and appetites all over the country, because popping each one as you go makes them really fun to eat.
For those who don’t have one nearby – unlikely, as there’s one in my tiny town – M&S launched bubble tea in its cafés this spring, offering strawberry and mango & passionfruit flavours, and you can buy boba kits in most supermarkets, often the Mokka branded kits that come in flavours such as matcha and brown sugar, for under a fiver, while Jelly Belly has just launched an entire boba range including taro, mango and strawberry flavours.
4. Wagyu
Japanese beef is known for its incredibly dense marbling. Until recently, Wagyu was an almost folkloric food, available only in incredibly chic Japanese restaurants such as Nobu – co-owned by Robert de Niro – with a highly secretive methodology surrounding the Wagyu cattle rearing and production methods.
But since Japan began officially exporting it in 2014, more UK residents have tried it and loved it – and now you can buy it in Aldi for a few quid, or in Waitrose, for a few more quid. Aldi’s Specially Selected Wagyu Sirloin (£6.99) was the only British steak to win a gold medal at 2023’s World Steak Challenge, while its ribeye and fillet won silver and bronze in their categories.
In 2018 Warrendale Wagyu began the first British Wagyu farm and it’s now the fastest growing cattle breed in the UK. Warrendale plans to double production by 2025, from the equivalent of 105,000 burgers and 18,000 steaks every week in 2023. What’s more, the company says younger consumers, the 25-34-year olds bridging the Gen-Z-Millennial boundary, make up 28 per cent of private customers.
5. Pastel de nata
This one is bittersweet for me. As a lifelong fan of Portuguese cuisine, 20 years ago I, by chance, moved a street away from one of the scant Portuguese delis in the UK selling these bijou custard tarts with their sweet yellow custard, flaky pastry, and scalded skin.
I bought one as a very occasional treat to remind me of holidays and I’m ashamed to report, like a dog in a manger, that the fact I can now buy a four-pack for £2.85 from Tesco – all of the supermarkets carry fresh or frozen versions – doesn’t make me any happier. You can also buy them in Pret and Costa, and there’s even a nata-only pastelaria chain, Santa Nata, about to open its fourth shop in London along with Bicester and Oxford.
Of course, we Brits have previous with custard tarts, but the egg yolk yellow Portuguese version is so much better than our anaemic-looking offerings, and it’s the one thing I like to keep for my summer break.