Baked Feta Pasta
A whole block of feta and a tray of tomatoes roasted until they collapse, then stirred into a sauce with a fork. The feta must be a block in brine, not the crumbled kind.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 40 min
- Total
- 50 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Bake
Pasta
To finish
Method
Bake
Heat the oven to 200C fan.
Tip the tomatoes into a baking dish just big enough to hold them in a crowded single layer, and tuck the unpeeled garlic among them.
Sit the block of feta in the middle and push the tomatoes up around it.
Use a block in brine rather than a pre-crumbled pack. Crumbled feta is drier, often has anti-caking starch on it, and will not melt into a sauce — it stays as grains no matter how hard you stir.
Pour the oil over everything and scatter with chilli flakes, oregano and pepper.
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the tomatoes have burst and darkened at the edges and the feta is soft and browned on top.
Pasta
Boil the pasta in well-salted water to 1 minute short of the packet time, and save a mugful of the water.
To finish
Squeeze the soft garlic out of its skins into the dish and discard the skins.
Mash everything together with a fork — feta, tomatoes, garlic and oil — until it becomes a rough, streaky orange sauce.
Add the drained pasta and a good splash of the pasta water, and turn until coated.
Stir in the vinegar and the basil, taste for salt, and serve. It rarely needs salt; feta brings plenty.
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What to expect
- Taste
Sharp and salty from the feta against sweet roasted tomato, with the garlic mild and nutty behind it. It is a much sharper sauce than a tomato pasta usually is, and the vinegar at the end pushes it further rather than softening it.
- Aroma
Roasting tomatoes and hot olive oil. The oregano becomes noticeable in the last ten minutes.
- Texture
Creamy from the feta but not smooth, with soft tomato pulp and the odd piece of skin. The contrast between the creamy sauce and the firm pasta is what carries it.
- Sound
The dish still spitting when it comes out of the oven.
- How the flavour moves
Salt first, then sweet tomato, then a sour finish from the feta and vinegar. Very little length, which is why it is a weeknight dish rather than a dinner-party one.
- Serve it
Hot, and it needs to be — the sauce stiffens noticeably as it cools.
- Goes with
A green salad. A cold white with some acidity, or a rosé.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner. It is the easiest recipe in this batch by some distance.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
One baking dish and a pasta pan.
- When to make it
A weeknight. Ten minutes of work and forty of oven.
- Best season
Best in late summer when tomatoes are cheap and sweet; use tinned in winter.
- You know it is done when
Tomatoes split open, wrinkled and darkened at the edges, sitting in orange oil. The feta browned in patches on top and slumped rather than holding a sharp block shape.
- And it feels like
The feta should mash to a rough cream against the fork with a little grain left. Completely smooth is not the aim.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. The dish and the oil are extremely hot coming out of the oven and the oil is the thing to be careful with.
- Where it goes wrong
- Pre-crumbled feta, which will not melt and stays as grains.
- A dish that is too big, so the oil spreads and burns.
- Peeled garlic, which scorches.
- Taking it out at 25 minutes, before the tomatoes have properly collapsed.
- Not saving pasta water, so the sauce is claggy.
- Adding salt. It almost never needs any.
- If it does go wrong
Grainy: the feta was the wrong kind, and it cannot be fixed in the pan. Watery: the tomatoes needed longer, or the dish was too large. Claggy: pasta water, a splash at a time. Too salty: more pasta, and no more salt anywhere.
- Making it ahead
Poorly. Cook it and eat it.
- Keeping it
Two days in the fridge. It is a poor leftover; the sauce tightens.
- Reheating
A pan with a splash of water.
- Freezing
No.
- Leftovers
The sauce without pasta is good on toast.
- Scaling it
Doubles with two dishes rather than one deep one.
- Substitutions
Larger tomatoes halved will do but give a looser sauce; cherry tomatoes have more concentrated flesh and less water. Full-fat goat's cheese works and is sharper. Do not substitute a hard cheese — this depends on feta's ability to soften without melting into oil.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten and milk. Vegetarian as written, since feta is usually made with microbial rennet — though not always, and the label decides it. Gluten free with gluten-free pasta. Egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
Feta is a protected designation and must be Greek, made with sheep's and goat's milk. Cheaper 'salad cheese' or 'Greek-style cheese' is cow's milk, is a different thing, and behaves differently in the oven.
- Keeping the cost down
Cherry tomatoes are the expensive part; a tin of cherry tomatoes drained of most of its juice is a passable and much cheaper version.
- Sustainability
Vegetarian and mostly vegetable, which puts it near the bottom of this collection's footprint. Sheep and goat dairy carries a higher impact per kilogram than cow's milk, so the feta is the heaviest part of a fairly light dish. Out-of-season cherry tomatoes are often grown under heat or air-freighted, and a drained tin of cherry tomatoes is both cheaper and lower-impact in midwinter — it is one of the few cases where the tinned version is the better choice on both counts.
- Nutrition
Reasonable. Feta is salty and the olive oil is generous; the tomato content is high.
- Worth it?
Buy the right feta and give it forty minutes rather than twenty-five. Nothing else about it is difficult.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Finland, 2018.
- Also called
Uunifetapasta — oven feta pasta.
- Said out loud
OO-nee-FET-a-pas-ta.
- What the name means
Literally oven-feta-pasta in Finnish, which is exactly what it is.
- History
Jenni Häyrinen published the recipe on her Finnish food blog in 2018, and it spread widely enough in Finland during 2019 that feta sales rose sharply and shops reported shortages. In January 2021 it spread again through TikTok to a global audience and repeated the same shortage in several countries. It is one of the very few dishes in this collection whose invention has a name, a date and a documented effect on a supply chain.
- Why it matters
A genuine case study in how recipes now spread. It also arrived at a particular moment — a winter of lockdowns, when a one-dish recipe made from four supermarket items had an obvious appeal.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight with almost no effort.
- The traditional way
None; it is a modern recipe rather than a traditional form.
- How it changed
Additions have accumulated — garlic, chilli, onion, olives — but the core of a block of feta baked in tomatoes has stayed put.
- Regional variations
Versions with boursin, with goat's cheese, and with gnocchi instead of pasta.
- How this version differs
Roasted garlic squeezed in from its skins and a teaspoon of vinegar at the end, neither of which is in the original. The insistence on a block in brine rather than crumbled feta is the one instruction that decides whether the dish works.
- Sources and credit
Jenni Häyrinen, Finland, 2018. Worth naming, since it is rare to be able to.
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