In 2020, we had the Dalgona coffee.
In 2021, we have the Uunifetapasta, which roughly translates to "baked feta pasta" in Finnish.
Viral TikTok recipe
If you've gone down the TikTok rabbit hole in the past few weeks, you may have seen a variation of this pasta dish on your For You page.
@feelgoodfoodieBaked feta pasta with cherry tomatoes!! Recipe on blog • Inspired by @grilledcheesesocial 😘 #tiktokpartner #learontiktok #fetapasta #recipes♬ original sound - Feel Good Foodie
While it recently gained popularity on social media this year, the recipe was actually created by Finnish food artist Jenni Häyrinen in 2019.
According to reports, the dish has caused feta cheese to sell out in Finland.
Many were also mindblown that it required only five main ingredients: Feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil and pasta.
Here's the recipe:
Baked feta pasta
Ingredients:
(Yields four servings)
- Two punnets (250 grams each) of cherry tomatoes
- One block of feta cheese
- Four to six cloves of garlic
- 400 grams of pasta
- Black pepper
- Chilli padi or chilli flakes (optional)
- Fresh basil
Method:
Place cherry tomatoes in a casserole dish and drizzle with enough olive oil and black pepper to coat the cherry tomatoes.
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Place a block of feta cheese in the middle of the casserole dish and add garlic and sliced chilli padi or chilli flakes.
Drizzle more olive oil on top of the feta cheese (quite an important step if you don't want your feta cheese to look too charred).
As you can see, I didn't drizzle enough olive oil. Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
I also added some white button mushrooms, just because. Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Place the casserole dish in an oven preheated to 205°C and bake for 15 minutes.
In case you can't tell the different icons on the oven apart, I turned the knob on the oven to the "conventional heating" icon:
Once it's baked, turn up the heat to 225°C on the grill setting and leave the casserole dish in for another 10 minutes.
The grill setting looks like this:
Once that's done, the cherry tomatoes should be blistered and the cheese should be melted.
I should have drizzled more olive oil on top of the cheese but don't worry, it's like wok hei. Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Mash the ingredients together to make a sauce.
While the recipe calls for one to mix the pasta into the sauce, I'd recommend adding the sauce slowly into the pasta until you get your desired sauce-pasta ratio.
Doesn't look that appetising at this stage, but trust the process. Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Top the dish generously with basil and serve.
Here's what it looks like after it is evenly mixed:
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
And here's what it looks like served:
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Looks appetising enough.
Rich and flavourful pasta
As someone who prefers spicy notes over the creamy rich flavour of cheese, I deviated from the recipe by adding raw chopped garlic after adding the sauce to the pasta for a little extra kick.
This helped make the dish less surfeiting and more flavourful.
If you're wondering what it tastes like, it is a good mix of tangy and salty from the feta cheese, sweet and savoury from the cherry tomatoes and sufficiently spiced up with the chilli padi, black pepper, garlic and basil leaves.
Here's how some of our colleagues described it:
"Like pasta you can get from restaurant but better because you can customise it yourself."
"I like the addition of the spices, like an atas and less jelak mac and cheese."
Verdict?
Total price
For a meal that can feed at least four people, I only had to spend less than S$12 on the following items:
- Feta cheese (S$7)
- Cherry tomatoes (S$2.80)
- Fresh basil (S$1.70)
Meanwhile, the other ingredients are staples that one can usually find at home.
Total time
It took less than 35 minutes to prepare this dish, of which, 25 minutes of which was just the time in the oven.
Level of difficulty
Pretty fool-proof, considering that it requires minimal cutting or chopping of ingredients and at the end of the day, I only had to wash one casserole dish.
My final verdict? I would probably make it again to seem like a domestic goddess at potlucks and family gatherings.
Top image by Fasiha Nazren.