Insalata Caprese
Half the Caprese salads served outside Italy arrive drizzled with a thick, dark balsamic reduction, which is not how this dish is actually made on Capri, where it comes from, and where nobody has ever felt the tomato and the mozzarella needed rescuing by anything sweeter than good olive oil. My mother considers the balsamic version a different salad entirely, and refuses to call it by the same name.
Ingredients
- 4 ripe tomatoes, sliced
- 300g fresh mozzarella (buffala, if you can find it), sliced
- A handful of fresh basil leaves
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Fine sea salt and black pepper
Serves 4 as a starter.
Cookware Required
- un coltello affilato (a sharp knife)
Method
Slice the tomatoes and mozzarella to roughly the same thickness, and arrange them alternating on a plate, tucking a basil leaf between each pair.
Season with salt and a few turns of black pepper, and finish with a generous, unhurried drizzle of the best olive oil you have. There is nothing else to do to this dish. Anything more is a different dish.
Quando Va Storto
If the salad tastes watery and thin, your tomatoes were cold from the refrigerator; this dish wants its tomatoes at room temperature, where their flavor is actually at its fullest, not chilled into blandness. If the mozzarella tastes rubbery rather than soft and yielding, it was also too cold, or it was a low-moisture, shelf-stable variety rather than the fresh kind packed in water; there is no correcting for the wrong cheese here. And if it tastes like nothing in particular despite every ingredient being technically present, you likely reached for tomatoes out of season -- this salad has exactly three ingredients doing any real work, and none of them can compensate for a winter tomato.