Baked Feta Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes
This recipe started on a European blog and took the world by storm when its popularity exploded on TikTok. It features a lot of ingredients cooked at the same time, seemingly without individual prep, but the finished product is a delicious sauce emulsified with the oil, tomato juices, and pasta water. The sauce lends itself to gluten free pasta quite well (which is not always the case with these styles of recipes), so if that’s your thing proceed without hesitation!
Many different chefs have applied their own takes on this, but here’s my master recipe. With ingredients like this, how could you go wrong?
I mean, look at that!
Yields: Serves 4-6
Active Time: 15m
Total Time: 45m
INGREDIENTS:
2 Pints (20oz) Cherry Tomatoes
1-2 shallots, or half a red onion, diced
6-8 cloves of garlic, smashed
Kosher salt
Black Pepper
Red Pepper flakes, preferably aleppo style (see note), to taste
1 (8-10oz) block of feta cheese
½ c. olive oil
4-6 springs of fresh thyme
8-10 oz (half a 1lb box) pasta (see note)
Small handful of fresh basil, chopped
Zest of one lemon (optional)
Parmesan or Pecorino Romano for serving (optional)
RECIPE:
Preheat your oven to 400F. In a large glass or ceramic baking dish combine tomatoes, shallots, garlic, and most of your olive oil. Season everything with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes and stir to combine and get everything evenly coated. Scoot ingredients to the side of the dish. Place Feta in the middle of all your ingredients, spread thyme leaves over it all, and pour the rest of your olive oil over the block of feta. Place in the center of your oven and cook for 40-45 minutes, shorter for a more solid texture to the cheese and longer for a softer texture.
Meanwhile, fill a skillet with water and bring to a boil over high heat (if this small-amount-of-pasta-water technique freaks you out, see note). You should have just enough water to fit your pasta into. Once boiling, and ideally about 10 minutes before your baking dish is done cooking, add a large pinch of salt and cook pasta until just past al dente. Drain, reserving at least ½ cup of pasta water.
Remove baking dish from the oven. Pick out the springs of thyme; most of the leaves should have fallen off, but you can slide any others off the stem if you wish. Add half the basil and lemon zest, and use a wooden spoon to smash the feta cheese and combine all the ingredients. Add pasta and ½ cup of pasta water, stirring and mixing (using tongs if necessary) until pasta sauce is fully emulsified and delicious looking. Season with salt, pepper, pepper flakes, and parmesan until it’s perfect to you.
Serve, topped with reserved basil and parmesan cheese. Enjoy.
HELPFUL NOTES
I highly prefer Aleppo pepper flakes because of their lack of seeds, as opposed to traditional red pepper flakes. Seeds are very spicy, so you can get bites with no spice at all and suddenly a seed with an unpleasant spike of spice. Aleppo pepper flakes are much more evenly spiced throughout, and make for nicer presentation. They should be available at most super markets and spice shops, but can be ordered online.
This is traditionally served with thick pastas, such as rigatoni, rotini, but I think bucatini or shells would be really nice too. I used Barilla gluten-free spaghetti in the picture and it was lovely (and no, they don’t pay me).
You don’t need a lot of water to cook your pasta. There’s actually a lot of benefits to using less pasta water than you’re used to (higher starch content, less water waste, faster boiling time). Here’s a great article by Kenji Lopez-Alt on the subject.