Baked Feta Pasta

About

Baked Feta Pasta, also known as Unnifetapasta, refers a viral recipe video by Instgram user @liemessa. The recipe instructs cooks to line a casserole dish with cherry tomatoes and places a block of feta cheese in the center. Then bake the dish for 30 minutes, adds cooked pasta and mix. The video and recipe grew in popularity in February 2021, following the video's spread on TikTok.

History

On February 4th, 2019, Instagram^[1] user @liemessa posted a photograph of a cooked "unnifetapasta," which translates to "baked feta pasta" from Finnish to English. The post received more than 2,600 likes in less than three years (shown below).

Following the post, the recipe inspired thousands of posts on Instgram.^[2] However, it was not until 2021, that the trend spread to Tiktok and saw considerable growth in popularity.

On January 28th, 2021, TikToker @grilledcheesesocial shared a video of the recipe that received more than 257,000 reactions and 1,300 comments in less than one month (shown below, left). That day, TikToker @feelgoodfoodie shared a version that received more than 1.1 million reactions and 8,100 comments in less than one month (shown below, right).

Recipe videos frequently go viral on TikTok, particularly low-stress, easy-to-make dishes. @Cookingwithayeh, for example, inspired a trend one month earlier with the Tortilla Wrap Hack. On January 29th, 2021, TikToker @cookingwithayeh published a cooking TikTok of herself making a baked feta pasta dish. In the video, she says that she did not create the recipe, but rather that it was so popular in Finland, where they "ran out of feta cheese" as a result. The post received more than 10 million views, 1.2 million reactions and 7,200 likes in less than three weeks (shown below).

Soon after @cookingwithayeh's video posted, other TikTokers attempted to recreate the recipe on their channels. The following day, TikToker @nareens.eats shared a variation of the video that received more than 774,000 views, 100,000 reactions and 885 comments in less than three weeks (shown below, left). TikToker @sulheejessica posted a variation on February 3rd that received more than 483,000 reactions and 2,800 comments in less than one week (shown below, right).

As of February 2021, the #bakedfeta^[3] tag on TikTok received more than 40 million views.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References