THURSDAY THE LONG WAY: CAPRESE

Thursday highlights food from out of the way places, food memories that have formed the way I view food, both cooking it and eating it. These memories may be inspired by recent meals, the food-media, or anything at all.

There are certain things that no matter how many times you've eaten them, you just can't help yourself but order them. One such thing for me (among many others) is Mozzarella Caprese.

Mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, olive oil, a touch of vinegar maybe, just a little bit of heaven on a plate. I can't for the life of me remember the first time I had this dish but I can tell you I ordered it throughout my teens without a second thought. Mozarella Caprese is like Manicotti, very simple but very telling of the restaurant you're eating in. These dishes are standards in Italian-American trattorias. They're always there and can take you to a higher realm of enjoyment if they're done the right way but if you get one or the other and they're sub-par I'll bet most of the other food is too.

My love for this dish has become a search to find the ultimate version of it. It's a curse I tell you, a curse!

Seriously though, there are some criteria for a good mozzarella caprese: the tomatoes have to be fresh and the mozzarella, well it better not be cold and hard. Good mozzarella means not cold and kind of semi-hard, not pizza mozarella (God help us all) but soft, and creamy, dissolve on your tongue mozzarella. I'm pretty sure the best version of the dish I ever had was with burrata, a mozzarella to which cream is added, though embarassingly enough I can't say where I had it.