The New Salted Caramel: Foods You'll Be Craving This Year

This summer's Fancy Food Show featured everything from pickled Brussels sprouts to chipotle mayo and "drinking" vinegar. But the thing we were most taken by? The savory reinvention of foods that usually are sweet.

A Dairy Renaissance

"Yogurt doesn't have to be sweet" is the tagline from Brooklyn's Sohha yogurt—after all, it's really just milk that's been heated and then cooled, and Sohha's flagship product tastes simply (and wonderfully) tangy and salty. If you're game for even more of a departure from peach and strawberry, though, Sohha's "everything bagel" mix-in might be for you; it's made with pine nuts, poppy seeds, sesame, garlic and onion. Chobani is also using its plain yogurt in savory dips featuring roasted red peppers, chili, lime and smoked onion, among other ingredients; they're good for dipping chips or veggies into, spooning onto baked potatoes or serving with nachos.

Pumpkin skyrocketed to popularity with pumpkin spice lattes more than 10 years ago, and it's been pumpkin-spice everything ever since, from cream cheese to Jell-O. But there's much more to the squash than its affinity for cinnamon and nutmeg. We spotted the veg in Skillet's Pumpkin Ketchup, which can go atop burgers or other sandwiches, and Urban Accents' Mexican Chile Pumpkin Mole (simmer it with chicken or vegetables). Pumpkin seeds, too, are showing up in unlikely places, such as in American Spoon's Pumpkin Seed Salsa, a sauce that also includes tomatoes, red bell peppers, onions, vinegar and cilantro.

Salad Girl's Dark Cocoa and Sea Salt Vinaigrette is surprisingly sophisticated—the cocoa takes on a flavor that's way more complex than a candy bar, and the dressing is especially tasty with salads that include fruit or nuts. Another direction we saw chocolate take: hummus. Delighted by Dessert's Brownie Batter dessert hummus is definitely more decadent than the usual tahini-and-chickpea blend, but put it on a sandwich with some sliced apples and we'd happily call it lunch (and dessert).