People Are Obsessed With This Simple Feta Pasta Recipe From TikTok
In the year of viral food and drink trends, from dalgona coffee and cloud bread to birria tacos, here's another from TikTok to try out. It's a totally simple, almost-feels-like-you're-cheating way to make a creamy, delicious pasta trend that has the TikTok-verse abuzz. It all started with food blogger Jenni Häyrinen in Finland, who popularized the idea over a year ago, oddly enough. Häyrinen's recipe, originally called "uunifetapasta" took Finland by storm first, and she alleges stores in the 5.5 million-person country were actually running out of feta (via Liemessä)
The Finnish blogger and writer's fans abroad posted photo after photo of the feta pasta recreations from around the world, but it wasn't until the recipe was translated into English that it blew up in the United States (via Liemessä). Instagram account @grilledcheesesocial's McKenzie Smith is credited with first sharing the Finnish blogger's recipe back in 2019, but it didn't go viral until recently. And what's more, according to Smith in a recent Instagram story, Jenni Häyrinen wasn't the first one to make it either, but rather, another blogger back in 2018!
The internet reacts to this viral feta pasta
Feta recipe drama aside, this pasta dish is wonderfully easy to make, and can be customized infinitely. The basics are: you put some cherry tomatoes in a pan along with a whole block of feta cheese (yes, a whole block) and some olive oil, which get baked to brown, crackly perfection in the oven, with other optional add-ins like garlic or fresh basil. You mix in some pasta post-bake and have an instant meal that's creamy, salty. and indulgent.
Just search "#fetapasta" on TikTok, and you'll see what we mean by "obsessed." There's every possible take on this recipe, from a vegan version to one made entirely with Trader Joe's ingredients and even a diet version in Arabic. It's hard to tell just what makes a dance or a recipe go viral, and why it can happen years after its conception, but one Yahoo Sports writer puts it well: "it seems incredibly easy, yet entirely over-the-top at the same time." Amen to that.