Name: Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 18 min
Total time: 28 min
Yield: 2 servings
Cuisine: Turkish
Ingredients: 8 large eggs; 400 g spinach; 150 g feta, crumbled; 2 tbsp olive oil; 1 onion, finely sliced; 4 garlic cloves, sliced; 1 tsp ground cumin; ½ tsp Aleppo pepper or chilli flakes; ½ tsp fine sea salt; ½ tsp black pepper; ¼ tsp grated nutmeg; 2 tbsp chopped dill

Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta

Eggs baked into a bed of garlicky spinach with feta crumbled over, straight from oven to table in the pan.

28 min total Serves 2 servings Easy

Before You Start

Pour off the spinach liquid before the eggs go in. It is the single most common reason these come out watery.

Check at eight minutes. The whites go from translucent to set very quickly and two minutes is the difference between a runny yolk and a hard one.

The pan carries on cooking on the table — serve it fast, or move the eggs onto plates.

Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta, in preparation
Photograph credit: Eggs Benedict Florentine - Pasadena, CA by Daderot · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons

How to Make Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta

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Heat the oven to 190°C / 375°F fan.
Heat the oil in a wide ovenproof frying pan and cook the onion over medium heat for 8 minutes until soft and just golden.
Add the garlic, cumin and Aleppo pepper and cook 1 minute.
Add the spinach in handfuls, letting each wilt before the next goes in. Cook 3 minutes more, then tip the pan and spoon out any pooled liquid — wet spinach makes watery baked eggs.
Season with the salt, pepper and nutmeg and spread the spinach level.
Make eight wells with the back of a spoon and crack an egg into each.
Scatter the feta between the eggs, not over the yolks.
Bake 8 to 10 minutes, until the whites are just set and the yolks still move when you shake the pan. Scatter with dill and serve straight from the pan.

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Why It Works

Baked eggs are usually overcooked because the whole dish goes in until the whites are set, by which time the yolks are chalky. Making wells in hot spinach means the whites are already surrounded by heat and set from the sides in, so eight to ten minutes is enough. Feta is added before baking rather than after, so it softens without melting into the spinach.

Storage and Reheating

Best straight from the oven. The spinach base keeps 3 days refrigerated and can be reheated and used for fresh eggs, which is the better way to make this again.

Ingredient Swaps

An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.

Serving Baked Eggs with Spinach and Feta

Flatbread, for anyone not counting carbohydrate
A spoonful of thick yoghurt
Strong black tea