From pancake-cereal to whipped coffee, to carrot bacon to colorful cloud bread, TikTok has completely blown away the recipe game. The most recent viral food creation on TikTok that I have come across is baked feta pasta. 

The first to come up with this simple dish was a food blogger from Finland, Jenni Hayrinen, who posted a recipe video to her Instagram. With the video being watched by 2.7 million people, and newspapers picking up on it, the local supermarkets in Finland started to sell-out of one of the main ingredients — feta cheese. With this delicious meal constantly popping up on my TikTok feed, I needed to try it out. 

The dish involved five ingredients and only took me approximately five minutes to whip up. I started by getting a glass dish and filled the bottom with small cherry tomatoes. I then drizzled them in olive oil and sprinkled cracked pepper and salt over the top. Then I placed a block of feta cheese in the center and repeated the same steps. This dish is very customizable, so I threw in basil, Italian seasoning and garlic for extra flavor. After baking the dish for 35 minutes at 400 degrees, the tomatoes had a blistered look to them. As soon as it came out of the oven, I mashed in the tomatoes with the cheese, creating the “sauce.” Once it started to form, I threw in my pasta. I used Cavatappi pasta, but any pasta would do the trick.

The creamy pasta dish came together fast and tasted amazing. The tomatoes and feta cheese balanced one another perfectly. The tomatoes calm down the salty, tangy flavor of the feta cheese. The sauce was light, but still had a strong, flavorful punch in every bite. I recommend the ratio of tomatoes to feta be a three to one ratio. The feta cheese can overpower the dish if you do not have enough tomatoes to settle the flavor. 

If you do decide to make this dish, make it in your own way, there is really no way to mess it up. If I were to make it again, I would probably use fun, colorful kinds of pasta and maybe throw in some type of protein. The time it took to make and the few ingredients needed are the two factors that make this pasta dish excel above others. So to answer the question, is it worth the hype? Yes, I would say so. 

Recipe I followed from TikTok

Ingredients:

• 1 block of feta cheese
• 2 cups cherry tomatoes (or enough to cover the bottom of the pan)
• 1/4 cup of oil 
• 16oz pasta box of choice 
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 tablespoons Italian seasoning
• 2 tablespoons freshly chopped basil 
• Salt and pepper to taste