The baked-feta pasta that went viral on TikTok and other social-media platforms this month has people all over the world obsessing over it, making a run on cheese and posting appetizing pictures of their creations. The dish is pitched as incredibly easy to make, with a gourmet look and taste.
“You’re supposed to get a really creamy texture,” said Apratim Tripathi, a 23-year-old engineer in Bangalore, India. “I just got a puddle.”
The right stuff
Mastering the feta pasta recipe sounds almost as easy as making a box of mac-and-cheese: Pour half a cup of olive oil in a casserole dish, then dump in two pints of cherry tomatoes and an 8-ounce block of feta cheese. Bake for 40 minutes; broil for five. Stir in cooked pasta along with some fresh basil and minced garlic.
Some cooks have found ways to go astray. Using too little oil will dry out the dish, said Finnish food blogger and photographer Jenni Häyrinen, whose recipe went viral.
Some bloggers said that failing to bunch the tomatoes together keeps them from bursting and caramelizing properly; using Roma or beefsteak tomatoes won’t yield enough juice, they said.
Mr. Tripathi’s best guess is that his feta dissolved because it was poor quality. “The liquid tasted great though,” he said.
Apratim Tripathi's feta pasta.
Photo: Apratim TripathiEven Ms. Häyrinen said she set off her fire alarm the first time she made the dish. “That’s how you know it’s done,” she said.
Ms. Häyrinen first posted her recipe on her blog and Instagram account in 2019. She was confident it would take off in Finland because it was so tasty and easy to make; she wasn’t expecting a global phenomenon, with more than 600 million views on TikTok.
Hers isn’t the first supposedly simple recipe to delight and frustrate masses of home cooks. One recipe that spread early in the pandemic encouraged cooks to flip dozens of penny-sized pancakes to eat as cereal. Some people were disappointed to discover that pouring milk on the pancakes made them soggy. Pandemic cooking has inspired novice bakers to try their hand at sourdough and banana breads, with varying results.
There were the exploding rainbow cakes of 2019. Some people succeeded in eliciting only a trickle of sprinkles from their cakes rather than an explosion.
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Several years ago, a trick for making grilled cheese in a toaster went viral. A lot of people failed at that too. Some toasters caught fire, while others launched sandwiches into a sticky mess on countertops.
MacKenzie Smith shared the recipe as one of her first posts on her blog, Grilled Cheese Social. “They didn’t read my warnings,” she said. “Not all toasters are created equal.”
Ms. Smith, of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., helped popularize the baked feta recipe in the U.S. this year when she posted it to her TikTok account. She said even professionals are messing it up. Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle company Goop posted a version on its Instagram account that called for only a drizzle of olive oil, and People.com recommended using too few tomatoes, Ms. Smith said.
Food blogger MacKenzie Smith tastes her finished feta pasta dish in a video.
Photo: MacKenzie Smith“I was ready to rip my hair out,” she said.
The People recipe’s author Shay Spence said, “I mostly eyeballed the measurements after seeing many variations of it on TikTok, but I actually enjoyed how it turned out. ” Caitlin O’Malley, Goop’s food director, said “since we tend to use a lighter touch with oils, we opted for a few substantial drizzles, and that definitely got the job done.”
Ms. Smith said she’s getting about a thousand messages a day about the recipe. “So many people are making it wrong,” she said. “Canned tomatoes. Please no. Just make something else.”
Yumna Jawad, of Grand Rapids, Mich., also helped the recipe take flight on TikTok when she posted the version she cooked for her blog, Feel Good Foodie, on Jan. 28. She said 823,000 people have visited the recipe on her blog since then. Her TikTok video has 10.2 million views.
A lot of people have reached out to her saying it didn’t turn out right–either the dish came out dry or the feta didn’t melt properly—so she bought eight types of feta to see which works best. (She determined it was French feta; it’s usually made with sheep’s milk and she said it was extra creamy.)
“My husband and family are sick of it now,” she said. “They are like, ‘please, enough with the feta.’”
She said the biggest mistakes she sees are people using the wrong ingredients: trying to use beefsteak or Roma tomatoes which she says don’t have enough juice, and using low-fat feta, crumbled feta or just poor quality feta that doesn’t melt the right way.
Some people on TikTok are sick of it too——creating memes of feta, complaining about the attention the recipe is getting, and joking that the social-media site is now FetaCheeseTok.
Some cooks said they settled for crumbled feta or other substitutes because feta blocks were sold out. The Fresh Market Inc., a North Carolina-based chain with about 150 stores in the Midwest and Southeast, said its sales of feta have risen about 45% since the recipe took off on TikTok last month. It recently ran out of feta blocks. A spokeswoman said Fresh Market expects to be stocked again within two weeks.
Carolyn Marra could only find crumbled feta at a grocery store near her home so she improvised.
Photo: Carolyn MarraCarolyn Marra said she could only find crumbled feta at a grocery store near her home in West Palm Beach, Fla. “It doesn’t melt and remained chunky,” she said. She devised a way to salvage the dish. “I added a bit of goat cheese, which gave it the creaminess,” she said. Ms. Marra also decided to substitute pasta with spaghetti squash to make it a low-carbohydrate meal.
Some people said they have substituted ingredients in the name of creativity, not necessity. Lindsay Greene used strawberries in place of tomatoes with her feta pasta. She said it was delicious. People who watched her TikTok video of the effort threatened to report her to unspecified authorities for a crime against cooking.
“I had never seen reactions like that,” Ms. Greene said. “People telling me I need to go to jail.”
Lindsay Greene used strawberries in place of tomatoes.
Photo: Lindsay GreeneKelly Bradford, a vegan living in Florida, said she used a dairy-free feta cheese to make her pasta. They are usually oil-based, so they melt quickly and are prone to splatter. “When it came out of the oven, it didn’t even resemble a block of cheese,” she said.
The next time she made it, she put the vegan cheese in at the end. She said it turned out just right.
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The Link LonkFebruary 25, 2021 at 11:45PM
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TikTok’s Feta Pasta Is a Thing. Everyone Is Doing It Wrong. - The Wall Street Journal
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