Insalata caprese

Sliced tomato, mozzarella, basil leaves, olive oil, salt. That is the whole thing, and there is no step to get wrong, which is why it is on this site: what goes wrong here happens at the shop.

It is a summer dish and it does not translate to winter. A caprese made with a February supermarket tomato is three pale ingredients on a plate, and no amount of good oil rescues it.

Ingredients

Serves 4 as an antipasto.

	Metric	Imperial
Ripe tomatoes	4 large	4 large
Mozzarella di bufala campana	400 g	14 oz
Basil	a generous handful	a generous handful
Olive oil	to taste	to taste
Salt	to taste	to taste

Mozzarella di bufala is made from buffalo milk and fior di latte from cow's milk. Both are correct here and they are different things: the bufala is softer, tangier and wetter, the fior di latte milder and firmer. What is not correct is the low-moisture block sold for cooking, which has been made to melt rather than to be eaten raw.

Drain the mozzarella and let it sit out of the fridge for half an hour. Cold mozzarella tastes of almost nothing.

Method

1. Slice the tomatoes about 1 cm thick. Salt them lightly and leave them five minutes on a plate.
2. Tear or slice the mozzarella. Tearing gives a better surface for the oil to catch on.
3. Lay them out alternating, or simply together on a plate. There is no required arrangement and the fan pattern is a restaurant habit.
4. Tear the basil over by hand. A knife bruises it and it blackens at the cut.
5. Oil, a little more salt, and pepper if you want it. Serve at room temperature within the hour.

What goes wrong

It is watery. The tomatoes were salted too early or the mozzarella was not drained. A pool of pink liquid under everything dilutes the oil.

It tastes of nothing. Cold ingredients, or an out-of-season tomato. Both are the same failure: this dish has no cooking to develop flavour, so it can only present what you brought.

The basil is black. Chopped with a knife, or dressed too far ahead.

It is sharp and sweet at once. Balsamic. See below.

Why it works

It is a balance of one acidic wet ingredient and one fatty milky one, with salt and oil carrying the aromatics of the basil between them. The tomato's acidity is what cuts the mozzarella's fat, which is why the tomato has to be ripe: an underripe one is acidic without being sweet, and the balance tips into sourness.

Salting the tomato briefly draws a little water to the surface and seasons it through, and five minutes is enough. Longer and it collapses.

At the table

An antipasto, at the start of a meal, in a small portion, and not a lunch in itself. That surprises visitors most: abroad the caprese is a main-course salad with a pile of leaves, and in Italy it is three slices before the pasta arrives. There is more on where courses sit in how an Italian menu is built.

There is no balsamic vinegar in it, and no balsamic glaze at all. The sweet dark syrup drizzled over caprese in every other country is a foreign addition, and in Italy it would be read as covering up the ingredients. Nothing is poured on this except olive oil.

No lettuce, no rocket, no onion, no garlic. Oregano appears in the south instead of basil and is a genuine local variant. Pepper is optional and mildly contested.

It is served at room temperature with bread, and the oil and tomato juice left on the plate are mopped up, which is one of the few places that is unambiguously good manners.

The origin story is thinner than it is usually told. The dish is named for Capri, and the tricolore explanation, that it was built to show the Italian flag, is repeated everywhere and evidenced almost nowhere. The likelier account is that it emerged in the island's hotels in the first half of the twentieth century, and the truthful summary is that nobody has documented it well.

What an Italian would say

That the tomato decides it and everything else is assembly. That the mozzarella comes out of the fridge before you need it. And that if you have reached for balsamic, you have made a nice plate of something else.