Baked Tilapia with Lemon (2024)

This baked tilapia recipe is bursting with flavor! Pair the fish with lemon, tomatoes and feta for an impressive yet easy dinner.

Here’s a tilapia recipe with a total wow factor: this Baked Tilapia with Tomatoes & Feta! The tender, flaky fish is covered in a lemon garlic sauce, cozied up with burst cherry tomatoes, Mediterranean seasonings and gooey bits of feta cheese. If you think baked fish sounds boring, this recipe is for you! Each bite is savory with just the right pop of brightness. It’s ready in just over 30 minutes and great for impressing on weeknights or dinner parties. This one has already jumped to star status in our house.

Ingredients for this baked tilapia recipe

This baked tilapia recipe is the ideal healthy dinner that’s impressively delicious. To be honest, when we’re meal planning the idea “baked fish” never feels that exciting. But this one? It was so tasty the first time we made it, we couldn’t wait to share it with you. The zing of the lemon, melty feta and tomatoes, and briny pop of capers make it irresistibly fresh. Here’s what you’ll need for this recipe:

• Tilapia
• Cherry tomatoes
• Shallot
• Garlic
• Lemon
• Olive oil
• Feta cheese
• Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, smoked paprika
• Capers
• Salt and pepper
• Parsley, for garnish

How to bake tilapia

Tilapia is a white fish with a mild, subtly sweet flavor. It doesn’t tasty fishy, so it’s good for people who think they don’t like fish. Tilapia is easy to bake: you can simply season with olive oil and salt, or add the tomatoes and feta like in the recipe below. Like any fish, how long to bake tilapia depends on its thickness:

• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Season the fish with olive oil and salt, and add any vegetables that will be cooking alongside it (see below.)
• Bake for 23 to 28 minutes, depending on thickness, until the tilapia is flaky or reaches an internal temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

A few tips for seasoning

This baked tilapia is one of our favorite weeknight dinner recipes to date, because it looks and tastes so beautifully fun and fresh. A Mediterranean style recipe, it goes big on lemon, garlic and olive oil. Here are a few notes on the seasoning here:

• Bake the tilapia with lemon slices, then remove when serving. Mixing the lemon slices right into the veggies makes for bold citrus flavor. Remove them when serving: unless you love very citrusy flavors. If so, you can definitely eat the lemon slices: they’re extra tangy!
• Don’t omit the capers! Capers are a berry of the caper bush that’s native to the Mediterranean. They’re round and dark green gray, about the size of a peppercorn. Find them in the jarred section next to the olives at the grocery store. Their briny, salty flavor absolutely makes the dish!
• Feta is also key. You can omit it for dairy-free diets. But the small melty chunks of feta cheese sprinkled throughout is what makes this dish! We’ll admit, we were loosely inspired by the viral TikTok baked feta pasta for this flavor combination: and it’s spot on.

What to look for when buying tilapia

Is tilapia a sustainable fish? The vast quantity of tilapia available to buy is farm raised, so you’ll want to look for responsibly farmed tilapia. Here’s what Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch recommends:

• Look fortilapiafarmed in Peru in raceways and Ecuador in ponds. Then look fortilapiafrom Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
• Tilapiais a Best Choice when farmed in indoor recirculating tanks with wastewater treatment and a Good Alternative when the wastewater isn’t treated.
• Also, look fortilapiacertified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, Best Aquaculture Practices, and Naturland.

Sides to serve alongside

Make this baked tilapia into a meal by pairing it with a quick salad or veggie side dish! Here are a few ideas that keep the oven free:

• Salad like Romaine Salad with Green Goddess, Butter Lettuce Salad, Fennel Salad, Endive Salad, Frisee Salad, Kale Salad or Easy Arugula Salad
• Vegetables like Sauteed Green Beans, Sauteed Broccolini, Pan Fried Broccoli, or Ultimate Sauteed Vegetables
• Grains like Spinach Rice with Feta, Lemon Rice, Basil Rice, or Perfectly Seasoned Quinoa
• Pasta like Easy Angel Hair Pasta, Easy Couscous, Lemon Orzo, or Couscous Salad

More tilapia recipes

Tilapia is a favorite fish around here: it’s even milder than salmon, so it’s great for pleasing everyone. Here are a few more tilapia recipes to sample:

• Grab crispy Parmesan-Crusted Tilapia or Easy Blackened Tilapia
• Make tasty Pan Fried Tilapia
• Make crowd-pleasing Tilapia Fish Tacos
• Fire up the grill for Easy Grilled Tilapia
• Try other fish recipes like 15 Cod Recipes Everyone Will Love or 21 Easy Salmon Recipes

This baked tilapia recipe is…

Pescatarian and gluten-free. For dairy-free, omit the feta cheese.

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