Recipe by Jodie Smith

Baked Feta With Sundried Tomato and Olives

Name: Baked Feta With Sundried Tomato and Olives
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 4

Serves4 people

Prep10 min

Cook25 min

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BELAZU Flavour Hack Balsamic Sundried Tomato Paste (130g)

$9.95

Hand-packed and dispatched from our Corio, Victoria warehouse, with free delivery Australia-wide on orders over $100.

Baked feta with tomatoes is a whole block of feta baked in oil until it slumps, then broken through the tomatoes and olives around it. The tomato part here comes from one spoonful of Belazu balsamic sun-dried tomato paste rather than a tray of roasting tomatoes. Serves 4, 25 minutes in the oven.

Jar of Belazu Flavour Hack Balsamic Sun-Dried Tomato, the paste spooned over the feta before it bakes

Ingredients

Serves 4 with bread, or 6 as one dish among several. Prep 10 minutes, cook 25 minutes. Vegetarian, though feta is sometimes set with animal rennet, so check the tub if that matters at your table.

In the dish
200g	Greek feta, one block in brine, drained
2 tbsp	Belazu Balsamic Sun-Dried Tomato paste
250g	cherry tomatoes, on the vine if you have them
3 tbsp	Kangaroo Island extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp	Belazu Roasted Garlic paste, or 2 cloves, sliced
1 tsp	dried oregano
1 pinch	chilli flakes
Added late
80g	Kangaroo Island Mediterranean olives, drained
1 tsp	red wine vinegar
To serve
1 pack	olive oil and sea salt pita crisps
1 handful	basil or oregano leaves

Buy the block, not the tub

Pre-crumbled feta is drier and often dusted with starch to stop it clumping, and it dries out further in a hot oven. A block in brine holds together, softens rather than collapsing, and gives you the slab that makes this dish look like something. Greek feta stays salty and keeps its edges. A Danish style block, made from cow's milk, goes creamier and milder, which suits anyone who finds Greek feta too sharp.

What the paste is doing

Sun-dried tomatoes chopped from a jar bring oil and chew. This one is a smooth paste of tomato with balsamic behind it, at $9.95 for 130g, so a spoonful sinks into the hot olive oil and coats the tomatoes instead of sitting in lumps. Its stablemate, Belazu roasted garlic at the same price, saves peeling and slicing cloves that will only catch and burn at this heat.

Method

Heat the oven to 200C, or 180C fan. A small, shallow baking dish is better than a large one, because the oil needs to pool around the cheese rather than spread thin.
Drain the feta and pat it dry, then sit the whole block in the middle of the dish.
Scatter the cherry tomatoes around it, leaving them whole. Whole tomatoes burst in the oven and release their juice late, which is what makes the sauce.
Stir the tomato paste, the roasted garlic, the oregano and the chilli flakes into the olive oil in a cup, then spoon it over the tomatoes and the top of the feta.
Bake for 15 minutes. The tomatoes should be splitting and the oil around them bubbling gently.
Drain the olives well and scatter them into the dish, pushing them under the oil. Any brine that goes in with them will make the whole dish salty. These are whole olives, so pit them with the flat of a knife first, or warn the table.
Bake for another 10 minutes, until the feta is soft to the back of a spoon and lightly browned at the corners.
Take it out, spoon a teaspoon of red wine vinegar over the tomatoes and let it stand for 3 minutes. The acid lifts the sweetness the paste brought in.
Break the feta open with a spoon, fold it roughly through the tomatoes and olives, and tear the herbs over the top.
Serve it in the dish it was cooked in, with the pita crisps for scooping.

Feta does not melt, and that is the point

Feta is a fresh brined curd rather than a melting cheese, so heat softens and slumps it but never pulls it into strings. That is why the oven can run hot. The 200C is not there to melt the cheese, it is there to burst the tomatoes. Go lower and they sit whole and pale, and there is nothing to fold the feta through.

Questions we get asked

Which feta is best for baking?

A block in brine, not a tub of crumbles. Greek feta is made from sheep's milk, sometimes with a little goat, and it stays firm and salty in the oven. Bulgarian is tangier again. Danish style is cow's milk and much creamier, so it slumps further and tastes milder, which is the version to buy if you want it spreadable. Drain and pat it dry either way, because surface brine turns into water in the dish.

Can I bake feta in an air fryer?

Yes, at 180C for about 12 to 14 minutes, but use a solid metal tin that fits the basket rather than the basket itself. There is three tablespoons of olive oil in this dish and it will drip through a perforated base onto the element. Shake nothing, and add the olives at the 8 minute mark. Air fryers move a lot of hot air, so check at 10 minutes: the tomatoes burst faster than they do in an oven.

What do you eat baked feta with?

Bread and crisps for scooping is the obvious answer, and the olive oil and sea salt pita crisps at $6.95 are sturdy enough to dig with. The better one is pasta: the slumped feta and the oil in the bottom of the dish is a sauce for 250g of short pasta with nothing added but the cooking water. It also works spooned over roast vegetables, or on toast under a fried egg the morning after.

Make it ahead, and what to do with leftovers

This does not reheat well, because a second pass through the oven turns the cheese grainy. What you can do is build the whole dish up to the oven, cover it and keep it in the fridge for a day, then bake it straight from cold with 5 minutes added. Leftovers are better cold than reheated: fold them through warm pasta the next day, the same move as our olive and harissa pasta, or pile them onto toast.

The jar is the part worth getting right. Belazu Flavour Hack Balsamic Sun-Dried Tomato is $9.95 for 130g and the rest of the range is on the Belazu page, next to our wider gourmet condiments and olives shelves. If you are building a table rather than a dish, our guide to Christmas entrees sets the order of play, and the same jars turn up in our festive entertaining essentials. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post.