"It's endlessly adaptable, all but foolproof. Most of all, it's just really, really good." Mary Elizabeth Williams/Salon
Uninspired as usual, I picked up a rather long time ago cookbook gift as cooked on TikTok which like several such books, peppered with little yellow stickers, is lying around waiting for attention. The first sticker I turned to was one for Baked feta soup, from a TikTok account with the name Feel Good Foodie. Now I know that I have featured the Baked feta pasta TikTok craze at some time in the past, either with a dedicated post, or as an oddment. However, the soup is not quite the same thing, and having written about Again yesterday, and probably not really covered every aspect of 'again' I thought I would use this massively viral recipe to ponder a little bit more on the topic. And probably other meanderings too.
So to begin at the beginning those two photographs at the top of the page are from the actual Original recipe creator - a Finnish lady called Jenni Häyrinen with a website called Liemassä. Initially of course it was only in Finnish - a not widely spoken language - and so although Finland went so wild for it that they wiped out the supply of feta in the country it remained unknown until an American chef translated it, and somehow or other it got on to TikTok and it went viral. Feel Good Foodie creator - Yumna Jawad - is one of those responsible for its fame. This is her version on the right.
All of this began way back in 2019, when it was called 'Uunifetapasta,' which translates to 'oven-baked feta pasta'. It was the beginning of COVID remember and this may have helped its fame perhaps. Easy and tasty - if you could get hold of the Feta.
Today this is such an everyday dish that it has become mainstream. Everyone has a recipe it seems - and mostly the same basic one. The first recipe I found today, for example was Baked feta pasta from Woolworths, so if that's not mainstream I don't know what is. And it was almost exactly the same as the original. They should put the recipe on a card, by the feta and by the cherry tomatoes, because, let's face it it is photogenic, and it would probably increase sales of the two instantly.
It's not only the lower end of the recipe mill where it appears however, as I also found J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, taking it very seriously and scientifically in a video, Kitchn, and delicious. to name just two more prestigious websites that had a version.
But of course it doesn't end there. 2019 is a long time ago in today's world. We have moved on and it seems everyone - well not quite everyone - has meddled with it. Or maybe they always knew about baked feta and tomatoes and just didn't think to just bung in the whole slab of feta and then mix the final result with pasta. I just found a Jamie recipe for Baked feta tomatoes for example which comes from a Jamie Magazine and may well be old. It's not the whole block though is it, and is Mediterranean inspired according to Jamie. Very possibly the Mediterraneans have been baking feta with tomatoes since the Ancient Greeks - maybe even before. They may even, later in the day, have mixed it with pasta.
So just a couple of alternatives by the professionals: Kritharaki, broad bean and tomato herb salad with baked feta/Thomasina Miers/The Guardian; Baked feta pasta with mushrooms from Cooking with Ayeh which was one of the websites responsible for the viral spread.
Most interestingly and most absolutely in line with the digital nature of this dish were a whole lot of suggestions and comments from reddit:
"Made this without pasta but a boatload of roasted vegetables. It was amazing. Will make it again./bookluster/reddit"
"I added some roast garlic cloves I had in the fridge and chili crunch. The cloves melted into the feta. The garlic makes it so much better!/anon/reddit - interestingly our original Finnish creator also now adds garlic - not the chilli crunch however.
"I’m not a fan of feta so I use Boursin instead. I also add salad shrimp along with the pasta. Next time I want to add seasoned, baked chicken breast chunks into it. This is such a good recipe. Feels like I’m eating a fancy dish in a restaurant." cantech667/reddit
And then there was this, which raises a question I have often pondered on myself:
"I make this but with cannellini beans, no pasta, some olive tapenade, Aleppo pepper, and add some aruluga when done. It's really, really good./chicklette/reddit ... Isn’t that just an entirely different recipe but with a similar method?/hide your arms/reddit
Indeed. When do you stray so far from the initial concept that you have something else altogether? Thomasina Miers recipe above for a salad may be one step too far, really the only things the same are that the original ingredients are all there and the feta is baked. But there are additions and the final dish is a salad. How many extras do you need to add, or substitutes made before it's something else?
But maybe that's the whole point about the TikTok world. The Introduction to my book had a couple of interesting things to say about this:
"If you love to cook, your phone has become just as important as a sharp knife. Most often, the biggest influence on what you decide to make for dinner is the people on your feeds."
Well not me of course, although I admit that the internet has become a major inspiration when I am stuck with what to do with a whole heap of carrots for example.
The introduction went further however:
"What's made cooking on TikTok so special is the connection. When you post a video of your take on a recipe evderyone's making, you become part of the community around a dish - and become a creator yourself. You can stitch, you can duet, and you can meet a ton of other people along the way who also have a passion for great storytelling and knockout recipes."
It's not just TikTok though is it? It's Instagram, reddit, Quora - and a whole lot of other communities that I know nothing about. We never used to do this. The most we would do when I was young was to cook something new from a cookbook - most often for friends, who then might cook it themselves and pass the recipe on. I'm not sure that we would have fiddled with those recipes back then - not deliberately anyway. We might have made mistakes or maybe even a substitute but mostly we stuck to the recipes. We weren't as brave as today's youth. That's how I see it anyhow, but David Ellis of The Standard had a rather grumpier view:
"But, the thing is, this is not a recipe people shared after years of it being a dependable fail-safe. This is not a recipe discovered at a dinner party, stolen from the host. This hasn’t been passed down from the grandparents. This is a recipe that appealed to the get-rich-quick switch in all of our brains. It’s the promise of instant satisfaction, instant gratification – no surprise, then, that it comes from social media, which has conditioned us to crave exactly that. ... My favourite recipes, my favourite dishes, always remind me of somewhere or someone." David Ellis/The Standard
This recipe is six years old - sure - nut hundred - but in today's terms six years is a long time and people are still making it. However, he is right too as far as that association with the past - historical and personal is concerned. But I think it's a rather ungenerous way to consider the creativity that goes on out there in the virally digital world. Some of the experiments are weird and distinctly awful, but some are worth a go, and if millions and millions of people are making these things and enthusiastically passing them on to others then surely they must have something of value, even if the excitement is soon over:
"hard to get wrong, obviously tasty, but after four mouthfuls it starts to get quite samey?" Sophie Gallagher/The Independent
But that also can't be quite true can it? If it was it would have had its moment and we would have moved on. Things die just as quickly as they are born in the TikTok/Instagram world. But here we are in 2025, six years later from its invention and people are still getting excited - if not over the original dish, but how they can play with it.
"What is it about this humble dish made of ordinary supermarket ingredients that's made it so popular? I think it's the show-stopping technique — you put a whole block of cheese in the middle of tiny tomatoes and roast it. In half an hour, you can't not wind up with something that makes you go, "Damn, girl, I need to take a picture of this." In addition to tasting incredible, it doesn't hurt that this dish makes your house smell fantastic." Margaret Elizabeth Williams/Salon
When I think of it I have a block of feta in the fridge that needs using, although admittedly it's the Danish kind, and one site said that you really needed to use the Greek one. I could give it a go though - like Sophie Gallagher of The Independent:
"because it was Sunday, I was bored, and am easily sold on baked carbohydrates promoted by teenagers, I decided to give it a go."
Not this Sunday though. We're off to a family dinner. I bet it will include pasta though. Dad is cooking. Mum is in Bali with her girlfriends.
YEARS GONE BY
March 9
2024 - I made some Priddy oggies
2023 - In passing
2020 - Deleted
2019 - Nothing
2018 - Nothing
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