This Pasta Salad Revolutionizes the Beloved TikTok Recipe
British chef Nigel Slater tells how to make “the best pasta salad I’ve ever had,” and it could serve as a follow-up to the viral hit.
Nigel Slater calls his dish “the best pasta salad I’ve ever had.”
Source: Ten Speed Press
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It’s hard to imagine a recipe that will threaten the popularity of TikTok’s baked feta pasta in 2021.
That dish, which relies on pasta, cherry tomatoes, garlic, and a hunk of feta cheese, was popular enough that after Finnish blogger Jenni Hayrinen posted the recipe in 2019, feta cheese sold out at markets in her country. When the recipe hit TikTok in early 2021 via blogger MacKenzie Smith (@grilledcheesesocial), feta temporarily became harder to source in the U.S., too.
One thing it’s done, besides squeeze certain cheese markets, is remind people just what a supremely convenient and appealing ingredient pasta is.
In Greenfeast: Spring, Summer (Ten Speed Press; $26), the venerable U.K. food writer, cook, and television personality Nigel Slater offers a dish that could be considered a seasonal alternative to the TikTok sensation, starring almost all the same base ingredients—pasta, cherry tomatoes, garlic—reconfigured.
Spring, Summer is Slater’s follow-up to Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter, which was published in the U.S. in 2020. His recipe writing style is renowned for its poetic simplicity. Dish names are only a few words long: Greens, Coconut Curry; Baked Ricotta Asparagus; the intriguing combo of Mustard, Guacamole, Mozzarella, Bagel. The chapter list in his book reads like a Dr. Seuss stanza: In a Bowl, In the Hand, In the Morning, In the Oven, and so on. “Greenfeast,” writes Slater, “is a collection of what I eat when I finish work every day: the casual yet spirited meals with which I sustain myself and whoever else is around.”