TV night for the Chickster crowd usually includes food, wine, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though this week I believe Veronica Mars is scheduled (we loves us some Logan pretty hard). Kelly insists she loves wine, but really what she loves is a sweet sparkling thing like Prosecco or Strongbow Cider. I had an amazing thing at the Draughthouse last week, which was a pint of chilled Crispin Cider served over ice – yum. Get some if you can. For the rest of us, I’ll usually pick up a cabernet – Central Market on Lamar usually has some good picks.
Today, after some not so subtle hints on Cynthia’s part, I’ve picked up the ingredients for caprese salad – an Italian classic that’s easy to put together, hard to ruin, and almost inevitably a crowd pleaser. The trick to the caprese salad, as is the case with all Italian cooking, is getting the freshest, most high quality ingredients. The most crucial of these is the tomatoes. They should be vine ripened, tangy, sweet, and dense. Homegrown cherry tomatoes are best. Tomatoes from your local farmers market, likely picked that day, are a close second, especially if the stall owner will let you taste test one. If you do not have these, I recommend buying the very most expensive cherry tomatoes in the best commercial produce section that you can find. Or, if you do not like your guests that much, buy whatever tomatoes you want – however, the better the tomatoes, the better the salad, so maybe consider a sliding scale of how broke you are vs. how much you like your guests. Sometimes a compromise of generic grape tomatoes is fair. Lastly, do not store your tomatoes in the fridge. It will leach all the flavor out of them in a matter of hours.
Second, the mozzarella cheese. The best caprese I’ve ever eaten was at essentially a train station café in the southern portion of Italy, near Naples (or Napoli, if you want to be fancy about it). In that area, they use a special process and a special kind of milk to produce a kind of mozzarella cheese I’ve never tasted the equal of, which ends up all runny and milky and coats the tomato in mozzarella wonderfullness. This cheese is also the reason that pizza in Naples is hands down the best pizza I’ve ever tasted. However, we can’t get that cheese in Austin. You might be able to get it in New York, but I wouldn’t know where. What you can get, though, is fresh mozzarella packed in water in small round plastic containers. Buy the smaller balls of cheese, which should be about the size of a ping pong ball or smaller. The perlini, if available, are even smaller and look really good on a plate or toothpick. Again, you can substitute a cheaper version of the mozzarella for the fresh mozzarella if you like – I would recommend Sargento brand mozzarella if you’re going to do this, as it is better than average and available in almost every grocery store.
Presentation may vary. Sometimes if I’m feeling extra fancy I skewer two quarters of a mozzarella with two cherry tomato halves, but this takes a while. You can just quarter everything and toss it on a colorful plate. Cut everything up into small enough pieces that a single bite will include one or two pieces of tomato and mozzarella.
Dressing the salad requires drizzling it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and topping it with fresh (fresh! I mean it!) chopped basil leaves. The olive oil and vinegar, again, should be relatively high quality. I find that the Whole Foods 365 store brand olive oil to be a pretty good deal for the money. Also, make sure that whatever balsamic vinegar you buy, it reads “di Modena” on the label. It’s best if you make this dish just before you serve it, so that the tomatoes don’t have to hang out in the fridge while you wait for your guests to get hungry, but definitely save drizzling for just before you serve, as the vinegar will be absorbed into the cheese if it sits too long.
And that’s it! This dish usually gets eaten up as soon as it’s served, so maybe take a few bites yourself before you get out of the kitchen with it.
