One bizarre food trend that created quite a stir on social media last year was the fried water trend. Yes, you read that right! The food trend involves frying water – just like your samosas, papads, or bhajiyas! The trend which caught the Internet’s attention way back in 2016, is still one of the most popular ones. Notably, it was first introduced by YouTuber and chef Jonathan Marcus where he used flour, egg and panko crumb and fried 12 globules to coat and fry water. The weird experiment didn’t work out. But in December 2020, the man behind the YouTube channel ‘The Action Lab’, James Orgill, tried deep-frying water and got it right in the first attempt. Ashish Singh, corporate chef, Cafe Delhi Heights/Dhansoo/Nueva told indianexpress.com that the concept stems from molecular gastronomy, a discipline that brings together chemicals and physics in the concept of cooking to understand how a dish gets made. “We fry normal water after it gets coated with a salt/chemical called sodium alginate,” he explained.