Weight Watchers Pasta Recipe with Feta and Tomatoes (Updated for Personal Points!)

Have you seen the TikTok viral recipe for pasta with feta cheese and cherry tomatoes, and wondered if you could fit it into your Weight Watchers Personal Points? Good news: you can! And it’s absolutely delicious.

Is Baked Feta Pasta worth the hype?

If you’ve been on TikTok at all, you’ve probably seen many, many people making the same basic recipe: you put a block of feta cheese into a baking dish with olive oil and cherry tomatoes, bake it until the tomatoes are soft and the feta is melty, and mix it with cooked pasta.

I really wanted to try it, so I tackled the original version to start with. I made it with whole wheat pasta, which was one of the foods that I didn’t have to track on my personalized Weight Watchers Plan, and the rest of the ingredients weren’t too bad, points-wise. This would absolutely be do-able for me on my Personal Points plan some days.

(Of course, if whole wheat pasta doesn’t reduce your points, you can make it with regular pasta, but I find that wheat pasta is delicious—slightly nutty, with a great texture.)

But what about those other days, when I hadn’t saved enough points to have this for dinner? How much could I reduce the olive oil and feta until it just wasn’t a tasty dish anymore? How low could I get the points to go, while still thoroughly enjoying the recipe?

How I turned this into a Weight Watchers recipe

I made this recipe about a dozen times. I tried version after version with different amounts of feta and olive oil, and I made some important observations.

I discovered that the feta is more important than the olive oil, and here’s why: the feta gives it flavor, and the olive oil gives it that creamy mouthfeel (and some flavor, but not as much as the feta). If you take out too much feta, you can’t really replace the flavor. But if you take out most of the olive oil, you can compensate in other ways.

After making several versions with the olive oil constant but different amounts of feta, I decided that 5 ounces of feta was as low as I wanted to go (as opposed to 8 ounces in my original version). I desperately wanted it to work with 4 ounces of feta, because I buy feta in 8-ounce blocks, and being able to use half a block appealed to my sense of order. But alas, my taste buds told me that it had to be 5 ounces.

Once I had the amount of feta set, I started reducing the oil. I liked the flavor enough with 3 tablespoons of olive oil (a huge point drop from 8 tablespoons), but it was very dry. How to compensate?

I decided to increase the tomatoes from 16 ounces to 24. Sure, that’s a LOT of tomatoes, but they taste so good!! And the extra moisture made a big difference. (Don’t feel like measuring the tomatoes? They should just about cover the bottom of a 13x9x2 pan, with room in the middle for the feta).

However, it still wasn’t as creamy as the original. It needed a little something more.

The secret ingredient: pasta water

Pasta water is magic. I even keep some in my freezer, in case I forget to save some before I drain my pasta. (And it comes in really handy when reheating leftover pasta.)

Now, often I use pasta water when I’m adding under-cooked pasta to a skillet of sauce, and cooking the pasta the rest of the way in the sauce. That method is pretty forgiving, because if I put in too much pasta water I can cook it off. For this, though, we’re adding the pasta water to a baking dish that’s not going back into the oven, with no chance to bake off any extra, so add it just a tablespoon at a time until you get a consistency you’re happy with.

Mixing in some pasta water with the pasta saved my low-point version of Feta Pasta from being dry, and the extra starch made it a little creamier. Sure, it’s not the same as adding 5 more tablespoons of olive oil, but it saves a lot of points per serving!

Weight Watchers Personal Points Swaps

To recap, I’ve changed the amounts of three important ingredients in this recipe: tomatoes, feta, and olive oil. If you have more points to work with, you can increase the feta or the oil. And if you don’t track whole wheat pasta on your plan, using it for this recipe (instead of regular pasta) will save you a ton of points.

Ingredient substitutions

There are some substitutions that I experimented with, in case you can’t get these exact ingredients.

Crumbled feta

This recipe does work with crumbled feta, but if you can get a block, always go with the block. Blocks aren’t covered in anti-caking agents like the crumbled versions are. This can affect both melting and taste. The block will give you a creamier consistency.

If you do use crumbled, pile it in the center of the baking dish, and don’t stir it at all while it’s baking. 

Reduced-fat and fat-free feta

Reduced-fat feta cheese was hard to find in a block, but when I finally did, it worked fine. I’m sure there would be a bigger difference tasting it side-by side with one made with full-fat cheese, but when is that really going to happen? If you can find reduced-fat feta in a block and it lowers the points in your plan, I say go for it.

I wasn’t able to find fat-free feta in a block at all so I tried it with crumbles, and between not having any fat and having anti-caking agents, the cheese didn’t melt at all. If you’re used to fat-free cheese and don’t mind the texture, this will knock off some points, but I didn’t think it was a good swap at all. In general, I try to stick with full-fat cheese for everything, and make reductions in other places.

Pasta shapes

I love this recipe with whole grain spaghetti, since the sauce clings to it so well. But I also tried it with shorter shapes, and they all worked.

The only ones I would stay away from are hollow shapes like penne, which take up a ton of space and make it more difficult to stir everything together in the baking dish.

Grape tomatoes

Grape tomatoes absolutely work. That’s actually what I use most of the time. Any small tomato will work well.

Canned cherry tomatoes

You can substitute a can of cherry tomatoes for fresh, along with the juices in the can. It won’t taste quite the same, but it’s a great way to save money on this recipe!