Pensieri sull'Insalata Caprese

It's high summer here and the tomatoes are finally coming in hot and heavy, juicy and at their peak flavor and texture. The basil too is relishing the heat and putting on exuberant bursts of growth. Our tomato sandwich and BLT craving has been quieted to a dull roar now that we have had our first of each for the year. That can only mean one thing at our house, the life force of which is a full-blooded Italian: Insalata Caprese!

Insalata Caprese

At home, I dress my salad with pesto that I make without cheese. I find it a lot easier to eat if I am not having to munch entire or torn leaves of basil, unless I have the tiny piccolo basil which the Italians usually call basilico greco, Greek basil. I thin my homemade pesto with a lot of olive oil so that it drizzles easily over the salad.

I made many hundreds of insalate at the restaurant over the years. From mid-July to mid-September every year, when the tomatoes were at their peak of flavor, insalata caprese would go on the menu. Such a simple dish depends entirely on the quality of its ingredients: tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil.

I would go to the farmers market and hand select tomatoes twice a week. I would coddle those tomatoes like babies, sitting them on the counter in the pastry station away from the heat of the range, bringing them to the very peak of ripeness. Every afternoon, I would go through the tomatoes and select those that were perfect enough for the honor of becoming insalata caprese.

Also on the counter in the pastry station, we would keep flats of micro basil, shoots of basil with only two leaves, just a couple centimeters high, supplied by a grower weekly. I would clip a handful of basil for each order. That basil was alive until it went onto the plate. It does not get any fresher or more pristine than that, and that is what a great insalata deserves.

And every afternoon at 4 pm, one hour before the doors opened for dinner, I would pull mozzarella. Cow's milk mozzarella to be sure, because here in the US, it is nearly impossible to get water buffalo milk from which to make the sublime mozzarella di bufala, the only thing that could have improved my salad. The never-refrigerated mozzarella was still warm and oozing when I would slice it for a salad order. That freshly pulled warm mozzarella is to refrigerated store bought cheese as a Ferrari is to a Fiat.

The salt and olive oil got equal consideration. I sampled dozens of the great salts of the world to select the one for our restaurant, finally settling on a local salt made from saline aquifers, remnants of ancient seas now buried beneath West Virginia. Olive oil, likewise. My specialty goods supplier brought in dozens and dozens of oils from up and down Italy. The fragrant green gold oil I settled on from Trapani in far western Sicily was so good that customers would buy it from me for their homes.

I put so much care, so much of myself, into making a glorious salad, one that would rank with the best anywhere. After all that care, I was so disappointed that it was a struggle to sell, this queen of salads, la regina di insalate. Customers would ask, "What should I order tonight?" Invariably, I would insist on a caprese, knowing that I could not possibly make a better dish or one more representative of the season, knowing that it was the finest thing among great things on the menu. And more times than not, the customer would order something different.

There are a couple of things at play here. Most people have never had a great insalata caprese and therefore do not have any understanding of how fantastic this salad can be. Worse still, many of them have had inferior insalatas at myriad restaurants and have come away unimpressed. Those restaurants that offer salads each day of the year, using pink flannel gas-"ripened" tomatoes and industrial mozzarella, have done the dish an enormous disservice. I know of one really great Italian restaurant that offers crappy capreses all year long because "customers expect it."

The other thing at work at my restaurant in particular is that customers were dining out largely for a special occasion. For their special occasion, they wanted to order what they perceived as rare and expensive items from the menu, not a "salad." For their primi, they wanted scallops or foie gras, not something so mundane as a salad and not something that they had eaten elsewhere and found to be poor. They wanted something that would impress their friends at the water cooler the next day.

Toward the end of the restaurant before I retired, I came to dread having to make mozzarella daily. But now I miss the ritual and the extraordinary results. I still smile with memories of having friends over to the house on my day off, drinking wine, pulling mozzarella, and shoving it in each others' faces. 

And I still grimace when I remember how hard it was to sell such a delicious salad that I worked so hard to perfect.