Whipped feta with warm white pitta
A bowl for scooping, no chickpeas required
Halves easily for one bowl and one pitta. Keeps a day in the fridge, covered, though it is best freshly whipped.
Feta straight from the packet is too sharp and too crumbly to spread, but, whipped hard enough with yoghurt and olive oil, it turns into something pale, glossy and completely smooth, closer to a spread than a cheese. There is no tahini, no garlic paste, no seeds scattered over the top, only cheese, yoghurt and oil beaten well past the point you would expect it to change. Warm the pitta so it turns soft rather than crisp, cut it into fingers while it is still giving off steam, and put the bowl between two people with nothing else on the table.
Ingredients
Contains: Milk, Gluten
- 200 gfeta
- 60 gsmooth natural yoghurt
- 2 tbspolive oil, plus a little more to drizzle
- salt
- 2white pitta
Method
Put the feta, yoghurt and olive oil in a small food processor, or a jug if you are using a stick blender, and blitz until completely smooth and pale, with no lumps of cheese left, about a minute, scraping down the sides once.
Taste for salt, adding it a pinch at a time. Feta is often salty enough on its own.
Spoon the whipped feta into a shallow bowl, swirl the surface with the back of a spoon, and drizzle with a little more olive oil.
Warm the pittas in a dry frying pan or under a hot grill for about a minute a side, until they puff slightly and are hot through but still soft enough to fold, then cut into fingers and serve alongside for scooping.
Watch-points
- Use plain white pitta only, with no seeds or grains worked into the dough.
- Leave out any herbs, za'atar or lemon zest. The dip is feta, yoghurt and oil, nothing else.
Stoma note: Warm white pitta, like other white breads, tends to thicken stoma output a little.
Make it more nourishing
- Use 250 g of feta rather than 200, with an extra tablespoon of olive oil. It makes the dip richer without more bread.
- Blitz in 2 tablespoons of double cream with the yoghurt, for a looser dip and about another 100 kcal.
- Warm a third pitta and cut it into fingers alongside, for roughly another 160 kcal of bread to scoop with.
Swaps
- Instead of feta, use a mix of feta and cream cheese
- mellows the sharpness if feta alone tastes too strong
- Instead of olive oil, use a mild vegetable or rapeseed oil
- a gentler flavour for a sensitive palate