Viral Feta Pasta
One of the biggest TikTok food trends was the viral feta pasta. It involved baking a lump of feta cheese with cherry tomatoes, oil and some spices, then putting it in the oven for half an hour, mixing in some cooked pasta and breaking it all up together. At first glance, this looks like an easy way to make a pasta recipe which looks slightly more complicated than your standard 'add pasata and mixed herbs' method; however, the hard part is waiting for it to cook in the oven. Who knew that cooking pasta could take so long!? And after all that waiting around for what you thought was a quick and easy meal, you are left with what looks like a white gooey mess mixed with some pasta. When I made it I had to add a bunch of tomato puree just to get it to turn a slightly more red and orange colour (like you would expect from a tomato pasta!). In terms of taste, yes, it had a very nice feta flavour, but it was slightly too strong and there were no actual vegetables in it (unless you count the basil on top). It was very underwhelming in terms of actual taste.
Gigi Hadid's Vodka Pasta
Another recipe that went viral on TikTok was the vodka pasta, without vodka, which even at first glance sounds counter-intuitive. Made using a base of oil, tomato paste, hot pepper paste and heavy cream, all of these ingredients commonly occur in a lot of pasta sauces. There doesn’t seem to be anything that makes it more like a vodka pasta which uses the vodka to bring out the flavour in the tomatoes. This recipe definitely seems more like a trend that people follow just to sound fancy, as the difference between this and a normal pasta sauce is not huge.
All in all the TikTok trends, whilst they may technically work, are just that – trends. Not something that is worth doing on a regular basis but definitely fun to try.