Pasta
The TikTok Feta Pasta Craze Started in...Finland?
Plus, the one ingredient the recipe's creator deems 100% essential.
TikTok, this year’s great arbiter of food trends, strikes again, launching a new recipe into the viral stratosphere. The newest installment to the pantheon of internet recipe stardom, however, took an unlikely path to arrive at its current A-list position.
It started back in 2019—ahh, remember the halcyon days before, well, all this?—when food blogger and artist Jenni Häyrinen posted a simple, wholesome, and thoroughly appealing pasta recipe to her Instagram: uunifetapasta, or oven baked feta pasta. The dish’s preparation was simple: roast a block of feta, a smattering of cherry tomatoes, and a couple of chopped chilis on the same sheet tray. Once melty and blistered, remove, combine, and toss with freshly cooked spaghetti, or your pasta of choice. The result is a ridiculously easy and overwhelmingly flavorful pasta sauce (we know—we tried it!) that first took off in her native Finland.
“Right away, it started to go viral first on Instagram stories,” Häyrinen told me via email. “The next weekend I had a 3-day #uunifetapasta live on my Instagram stories, and reposted my followers' creations. Newspapers picked up on it, and it was not long before everybody in Finland was cooking it.” Häyrinen remembers the response to her recipe being so fervent that feta cheese soon became hard to source in local supermarkets. She says the original recipe video was viewed more than 2.7 million times (and for context: Finland has a population of 5.5 million).
Nearly 2 years after its inception, Häyrinen's feta pasta recipe is witnessing a TikTok revival. Accounts like @feelgoodfoodie and @grilledcheesesocial are bringing the recipe to the video platform, and garnering massive views. The recipe has taken firm hold on TikTok, with countless variations swirling across the platform. Some users add in basil, while others create vegan versions.
How does Häyrinen feel watching her recipe take off online? She's used to it! It turns out, this is what she's calling the recipe’s “third wave.” It peaked once more during the summer of 2019, when Mackenzie Smith @grilledcheesesocial) shared the recipe in an Instagram post. Like many internet phenomena, it’s hard to trace what accounts for the recipe’s sudden resurgence this time around, but Häyrinen isn’t complaining. “If things go the way I think they will, the world just might run out of feta cheese. I’m super happy and excited to see where all this goes.”
Amidst all the newfound excitement, Häyrinen joined TikTok. There was, she tells me, one key ingredient in the original recipe these new iterations seemed to omit: chili. “I just could not sit back anymore and watch people not add chili to it! So I posted the original viral recipe on TikTok too @liemessa.”
It turns out this Thursday, February 4th is actually International Uunifetapasta day in Finland. Häyrinen launched the day to gather all the feta pasta-makers across the world. This year’s celebration is sure to see a wave of new participants, given the recipe’s newfound fame. She plans to cook the pasta on Instagram Live, and invites everyone to cook along with her using the hashtags #uunifetapasta and #bakedfetapasta. “Uunifetapasta is here to stay, and people still make it all the time in Finland.”
Will you try this extra-popular pasta powerhouse at home? Let us know in the comments.
Written by: Valerio Farris
Popular on Food52
38 Comments
1. Preheat oven to 375. Boil 8 ounces of ziti or other tubular pasta til near al dente.
2. Set a block of feta in center of 2 qt casserole. Spread pasta around the block.
3. Top pasta with a pint of cherry tomatoes, 1-2 seeded chopped Serrano peppers, 1/2 cup torn basil leaves.
4. Drizzle some olive oil on the veg and cheese.
5. Bake until cheese melts and tomatoes begin to pop. My guess is 15-20 at 375. You could run under the broiler, if that pleases you.
Thank you!
And thank you to the helpful commenter who did include it below.
Delicious and a keeper, thank you.
1 block (7 oz / 200 g) greek feta cheese
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 red chili pepper
500 g cherry tomatoes
(4 garlic cloves if you wish)
black pepper
salt
bunch of fresh basil leaves
Pour some olive on the bottom of the baking dish. Place the whole feta block on top. Chop the red chili pepper and add on top of feta cheese. Pour more olive oil on top. Place the cherry tomatoes on the sides and roll around in oil. Grind some pepper and season with pinch of salt.
Bake in 400 F / 200 C for 15 minutes in the middle rack. Turn the heat to 440 F / 225 C, move the dish to the upper rack and use the grilling mode for another 10 minutes. Caution! This might cause the fire alarm to go off, mine does that every time 😀
Cook the pasta al dente according to cooking instructions. If you used cherry tomatoes with stems, remove them. The stems are there merely for the instagrammable look, so plein cherry tomatoes will do fine.
Break the feta a bit and mix with tomatoes. Mix the sauce with pasta and add plenty of basil leaves.
Tip! Garlic goes well with baked feta pasta. To add garlic cut four garlic cloves in half lengthwise, toss them in same time as the tomatoes and roll in olive oil.
baked feta pasta recipe
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