Caprese (Insalata Caprese)

Variations

• Caprese skewers: Thread cherry tomato, mini mozzarella, and basil for finger food.
• Burrata caprese: Swap mozzarella for creamy burrata.
• Balsamic reduction: Reduce balsamic to a sweet-tart syrup.
• With peach/avocado: Add peach in summer, or avocado for creaminess.

Tips

• Nothing is cooked, so every decision left is about timing. Set aside choosing the ingredients and the lines below are all questions of when — when it comes out of the fridge, when it is salted, when the basil is torn.
• The reason for room temperature is on the cheese's own page. Mozzarella puts it plainly: "The fridge is this cheese's enemy. Cold, the fat firms and the flavour shuts down. Thirty minutes at room temperature before serving" (serving temperature). That page also ends by pointing here — "with coarse salt, olive oil and basil it is simply caprese."
• Salting last, and the neighbour that does the opposite with the same tomato. Salade niçoise says to salt the tomatoes ahead and let them drain, and to put the liquid into the vinaigrette. Caprese has no vinaigrette. The liquid salt pulls out has nowhere to go but the bottom of the plate, so the salt goes on at the last moment instead. Same ingredient, opposite handling, and what decides it is whether the dish has a dressing to absorb what comes out (salt and seasoning).
• Patting the mozzarella dry is the other half of that problem. Fresh mozzarella is sold sitting in brine. Its own page says a wet ball weeps in the oven and soaks the base of a pizza and tells you to drain it in a sieve for thirty minutes first; here there is no oven and the same water simply collects under the tomato.
• Why the basil is torn. Fresh herbs explains it: finely chopped basil oxidises where the blade cut it — it turns black and leaves its aroma on the board. Tear it, or stack the leaves, roll them and make one clean cut. Whatever stays on the board is aroma that is not on the plate.
• It is a placed salad, not a tossed one. Salade niçoise draws that distinction against caesar salad — there the whole point is tossing, here the whole point is not tossing — and files caprese on its own side of it, noting that with three ingredients the arrangement is simple where a niçoise has seven elements to find room for.
• It's all about ingredients — use the ripest tomatoes and good fresh mozzarella.
• Bring the mozzarella and tomatoes to room temperature for the best flavor.
• Pat the mozzarella dry and season just before serving so it doesn't weep.
• Use good extra-virgin olive oil and flaky salt — they make the dish.
• Tear the basil by hand rather than chopping to keep it from bruising.