With inventive sauces, global spices and new apple varieties, the hottest culinary trend of 2025 may be bold flavors.

Amy Traverso, senior food editor at Yankee Magazine, said she’s a fan of two buzzy international flavors making waves this year.

“Black lime is just a wonderful kind of combination of citrus and salt and a little bit of bitterness and it’s a bit fermented. It’s a complex flavor,” Traverso said on Under the Radar with Callie Crossley. “You get the citrus, but you’re adding deeper notes, as well. Another flavor profile that I’m seeing in a lot of places is hawaij, which is a Yemeni spice mix. It’s a nice alternative to pumpkin spice, because it has ginger, cardamom, turmeric, black pepper, cloves, fenugreek, cinnamon and nutmeg. So that’s pretty cool.”

When it comes to wine, Jonathon Alsop, founder and executive director of the Boston Wine School, said smaller inventory and shrinking wine lists are on tap for 2025.

“A lot of really fine dining restaurants, they will carry millions of dollars in wine inventory,” Alsop said. “You look at their wine list, and, on the one hand, it’s extremely impressive. On the other hand, you’re facing this gigantic, long, overwhelming list, So a lot of restaurants in response to that, they’ll have a select list. It makes it very, very easy for the restaurant to enunciate the fact that these are the wines they really recommend. I think it’s very smart from a business perspective, and it allows you to change your whole wine list with very little effort.”

And in 2025, Traverso said we can expect some new apple varieties in grocery stores. Some, like Cosmic Crisp and Pink Ladies, are already widely available, but there are still a few hoping to overtake the popularity of well-known and beloved Honeycrisp.

“Out of Cornell, there’s Snapdragon, which is really pretty similar to Honeycrisp — a little more interesting,” Traverson said. “I’ve seen Snapdragon in supermarkets. I have not seen Firecracker, but I tasted it. It’s so good. It’s a lot more complex, has a lot more acidity, a lot more going on. People are using it for cider, which is a good sign that it’s a good apple.”

All this and more on this week’s food and wine roundtable!

Guests