Recipe

Summer Caprese with Honey-Balsamic Reduction

The finished dish on a blue-rimmed plate: sliced tomato, torn basil, crumbled cheese and a balsamic drizzle

Pre-salted heirlooms, room-temperature mozzarella, hand-torn basil, and a balsamic reduced with honey.

Serves
4
Time
15 minutes prep, 12 minutes cook

Ingredients

  • 1.5 lbs peak-season heirloom tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick
  • 8 oz fresh mozzarella, di bufala or water-packed, sliced and at room temperature
  • 1 cup aged balsamic vinegar
  • 1/4 cup local honey
  • 1 bunch fresh Genovese or opal basil, hand-torn
  • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • Flaky Maldon sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper

Method

  1. Pre-salt the tomatoes. Arrange the slices on paper towels, sprinkle with fine sea salt, and leave for 10 minutes. Pat the tops gently dry.
  2. Reduce the balsamic. Whisk the balsamic and honey together in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer and cook 10 to 12 minutes, until reduced by a third. Pull it while still fluid; it thickens as it cools.
  3. Assemble. Shingle the room-temperature tomatoes, mozzarella and whole torn basil on a platter. Drizzle the olive oil first, then ribbon the honey-balsamic over the top. Finish with Maldon and black pepper.
The culinary why

The ten-minute salt purge. Tomatoes are over 90 percent water. Salting early pulls the surface juice off so the glaze stays a glaze instead of dissolving into a brown puddle.

Cheese at room temperature. Cold mozzarella straight from the fridge is rubbery and coats the tongue in dull butterfat. Warmed to the room, it releases its volatile flavour compounds.

Oil before vinegar. Laying the olive oil down first stops the dark glaze sliding off the cheese or staining it streaky.

Tear the basil, do not cut it. A blade crushes the leaf edge and triggers oxidation that browns the cut within minutes.

From the garden

I know I say it all the time, but farming is always a gamble. You truly never know if you will ever get a return on any one of your micro-investments made throughout the year. For the past three years, we have had at least the threat of a frost in the first or second week of May. This can be very problematic for the warm season vegetables like tomatoes and zucchini, which do not like temperatures below 50, and cannot survive temperatures below freezing.

However, since we are not guaranteed any crop, even when grown in ideal weather conditions, why not try and get some early summer produce?

We tried an extra early crop of tomatoes that were started in a propagation greenhouse back in February, transplanted in late March, and have since been covering and uncovering with frost blankets for the past month. They are starting to produce fruit, and if they ripen up and I can snack on the first tomato of the season in May (the farmer always gets the first one), my mind will be blown.

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