That Viral Baked Feta Pasta Thing (Is Really Good, Actually) | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji um and today we're gonna make that tick tock famous baked uh tomato and feta pasta and i apologize because i actually started it already and i realized halfway through that my card needed to be reformatted so i've already got the tomatoes and feta in the oven so if you haven't seen this recipe i'm usually not one to jump onto viral recipe trends but this one actually seemed really legit for a number of reasons which i'll get into but if you haven't seen that recipe it's essentially you take what i've got here which is uh cherry tomatoes a block of feta cheese you need to use greek sheep's milk feta because the american stuff then the domestic stuff is not creamy enough it'll the sauce will kind of turn gritty whereas the um the greek stuff will stay nice and creamy and fatty some cloves of garlic and then i've also got a little bit of flat iron pepper company chili flakes in here um you can use whatever chili flakes you want i particularly like theirs because these guys i particularly like these guys because um they blend um well they blend a number different chilis they have a different they've many different flavors and they use very fresh flavorful peppers so a lot more flavor than your standard chili flakes anyhow some olive oil black pepper that's it no salt because the feta has plenty of salt in it and then you throw it into a 400 degree oven for about 40 minutes so that's been going for about 30 now and it's going to take about another 10 minutes meanwhile i'm going to get a pot of water going to boil some pasta and then we just stir it all together and it becomes this delicious pasta dish um the the reason why this recipe works so well um aside from you know just the obvious flavor combination of garlic olive oil tomatoes and feta is that it relies on cherry tomatoes um now you know regular it's not summer right it's not the end of summer right now it's not it's not cherry tomato season it's not tomato season at all um and generally i i would avoid using tomatoes out of tomato season because they generally don't have that much flavor and the reason for that is because in order to ship tomatoes they have to um pick them when they're kind of under ripe otherwise they kind of squash themselves under their own weight while they're shipping so they get picked under ripe they get artificially ripened in transport with ethylene gas which is i mean it's a naturally occurring gas but they artificially add it to make the tomatoes um turn red but they lack flavor and they lack juiciness so cherry tomatoes on the other hand and so the smaller the tomato the easier it is to find good ones in the winter and that's because of a thing called the square cube law which is that um as things get larger their volume and therefore their mass will will grow in three dimensions whereas their footprint only grows in two dimensions so their mass will cube um while their um their area the area that's supporting them will only um double uh sorry not double we'll um square world will square as opposed to cube um and so what this means is that the bigger things get the more um pressure they're putting on themselves so that's why like animals have a limited size that's why buildings have a limited size you can't just scale things up infinitely so likewise tomatoes when they're smaller they have a better ratio of support to mass than a larger tomato so therefore smaller the smaller tomato is the more ripe it can get before it's picked because it won't squash itself under its own weight um and so cherry tomatoes tend to be much better than larger tomatoes in the winter so cherry tomatoes in the winter they can be just as good as they are in the summer i mean obviously not if you have like a cherry tomato plant in your backyard and you're picking up picking it from the vine and it's still warm like those are the best but supermarket cherry tomatoes can be really good um cherry tomatoes are also higher in pectin than other types of tomatoes which is what makes sauces kind of um thicker it's you know it's the the it's the carbohydrate that also makes jams and jellies thicker but in the case of tomatoes um it makes tomato sauces kind of thicker and cling to your pasta better so cherry tomatoes are a great choice for making pasta sauces um out of season if you don't want to use canned tomatoes so those are the reasons why i think this recipe is going to work well it does work very well and as soon as this water comes to boil um i'm actually i'm just going to throw my pasta before it even comes to boil i'm using my my low water method of cooking pasta um and i know i know i know i know because every time i do this there's going to be comments um saying you need to use a gallon of pasta for a gallon of water for every 100 grams of pasta or whatever you know whatever it is you need a large volume of pasta um you don't uh and i've tested this myself in blind taste tests many many many times with multiple testers um harold mcgee has done it himself you don't really with modern pasta you don't really need a ton of water to cook it in um you really only need just enough to cover it i'm doing about a half batch of this here right now so i'm only going to cook probably about eight ounces of pasta 250 grams that'll be enough for uh two adults and a kid um so we're gonna let this pasta come up to a boil in salted water um oh and some people are gonna say you must let the the water boil before you add the pasta um you also don't really need to do that as long as you kind of give the pasta a few gentle stirs so that they don't kind of fuse together as they're heating up um they will cook just fine indistinguishable from if you dump them into already boiling water versus um starting them in cooler water and letting them come to a boil um yeah so i'm once this pasta is done cooking um they should be done right around the same time that the uh the tomatoes maybe the tomatoes will come out a little bit earlier so i'll pull those out i'll finish the pasta um and i will be back when all that's done so i will see you all in just about 10 minutes or so it might have been more or less i'm not sure um just a quick recap by the way so this is the tomatoes done so what i had in here um was about a pound of tomatoes of cherry tomatoes so um i don't know there are different recipes out there um but i use about a pound of cherry tomatoes um a block of feta which i don't know is like maybe seven or eight ounces six ounces um four cloves of garlic that i just split in half and then about a third to a half of a cup of olive oil so actually a good amount of olive oil this pasta is almost done so all that pasta finishes up i'm just going to get some basil which is the last ingredient this is basil that's past its prime but even past its prime basil is still basil um and for for something like this where it's gonna kind of wilt down into the sauce anyway it doesn't really matter um i wouldn't use this basil for like a i don't know caprese salad or something but um um basil's totally fine if it's if it's starting to brown a little bit if it's really excessive like that i might just tear off that part of the leaf and use the rest um but you know basil is one of those kind of delicate herbs that will start to turn brown even before it turns you know like mushy or gross or even before it even loses its flavor it's going to start to turn a little brown all right so get our basil those aren't great okay then i'm gonna chop it up real rough chop in this um when you chop herbs like this the easiest way to rough chop them just kind of roll them into a bowl like that gather them up roll them into a ball slice slight slice oh shabu shabu come back in here sorry i don't want it running outside right now give it a rough chop good girl and then back and forth across like that and that's really all you need um i'm gonna do half of this basil you know like a good handful of it maybe three quarters of it actually directly into this pan here um and that's going to kind of wilt in and flavor the sauce let's test our pasta see how close we would have done um so [Applause] very nearly there right so this dish by the way it was originally appeared um on a couple of swedish food blogs um it's called unifed pasta which is baked feta pasta then it's been of course it went on tik tok and got like 60 million views whatever a billion views um and then of course millions of other people have sort of covered it and written recipes so i'm not doing anything new here this is just one of those like viral recipes that i actually thought was legitimately good which most of them are not um which is why i'm making it here today all right the only real tweak that i'm doing here is when i drain my pasta the original recipe has you just drain the pasta and stir it in um i'm going to do what i do every time i make pasta and what you should do every time you make pasta which is save some of that pasta water because that starchy pasta water is what is going to help emulsify the sauce and make it sort of creamier and stick to your stick to your pasta better and it'll help get rid of some of that graininess that cheese can have so we're going to splash in good amount of it there to start and we might add a little more so that was maybe a quarter cup or so i'm gonna add my pasta and then i'm just gonna stir stir stir and you will see those tomatoes break down that feta start to break down and it should all form a nice sort of creamy mixture that really coats the pasta in a way that the way that you want your sauce to i don't know i like my sauce to coat my pasta don't you let's move this over here so we can get it on the get it on the other camera in some slightly better light i look better so it's going to look a little watery at first but then as that cheese really gets in and as those tomatoes release their pectin and you start to form an emulsion between the oil and the pasta water it's going to thicken up one of the sort of general rules of thumb about emulsions is that an emulsion by the way is a is a sort of mixture of a homogeneous mixture of two things that generally don't want to mix homogenously so most frequently in culinary terms of course that is an oil and water mixture so in this case the olive oil and the water released from the tomatoes as well as the pasta water as well as the water and the cheese but an emulsion a general rule of emulsions is that an emulsion is always going to be thicker than any of its constituent parts just because of the way emulsions make it more difficult for sort of molecules to flow past each other because it um well because in you know like a water water in oil emulsion for instance like water molecules are all completely surrounded by coated by oil molecules that form these kind of big clumps called micelles and so there's bigger mole those bigger molecule bunches don't flow as readily so that's why i like mayonnaise which is made with you know eggs and oil is much thicker than either eggs or oil on their own and you can already see it happening here so the the cheese and the olive oil and that pasta water are forming an emulsion and it's getting nice and creamy and that's basically all we're looking for um and of course this recipe you can like you can use more tomatoes or less tomatoes um if you have you know if it's in the summer and you've got some nice roma tomatoes you can use those um you can use different herbs it doesn't have to be basil it could be parsley it could be whatever you want really oregano i wonder what that is all right i'm gonna finish it off another little sprinkle of basil and i think we are ready to taste let's give it a go huh yeah i'll take one out for you shall we so you can taste them too that is seriously delicious hmm yes yes excellent all right that's the dish i hope you had fun there you go guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time bye-bye hey everyone it's kenji there are 22 million kids in this country that rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever organizations like no kid hungry can use their support so i'm asking you to join me click the link in the description below to donate some money no amount is too small or too big thank you very much and stay safe bye you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 620,925

Keywords:

Id: U3gvRjIQ6Lo

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LessWeakness]

1 lb cherry tomatoes

4 cloves garlic halved

Block of Greek (sheep's milk) feta

1/3 to 1/2 cup olive oil

8 oz of pasta (reserve some pasta water after boiling)

basil

chili flakes

black pepper

preheat oven to 400 degrees

combine tomatoes, garlic, feta, olive oil, black pepper, and chili flakes into casserole dish and place in oven for 40 minutes

when there is 10 minutes left on your timer, boil the pasta

when the 40 minutes is up, remove casserole dish from oven. drain pasta and reserve some pasta water

rough cut the basil and put about 3/4 into the dish, reserve the rest for garnish

mix pasta into casserole dish with enough pasta water to help get the sauce to the correct consistency

[u/Beardopus]

I've been making this for a few weeks now and it's great. He made a post about it on Instagram and I've been using that as a guideline.

[u/smaffron]

So glad he posted this. My wife has been pushing to make this recipe but I've read a lot of mixed reviews (feta was too grainy, sauce wasn't saucy enough, etc.).

I love seeing Kenji's take on these viral recipes!

[u/[deleted]]

Proper Greek feta is so amazing