Simplicity is the hallmark of Italian food. Insalata Caprese is about as simple as it gets and, in high summer, is one of the most delicious, transporting dishes you can make without turning on your stove.
If spring is about rebirth, with all sorts of edible green things reappearing at your market like new love, summer is full-on concupiscence with corn on the cob and peaches.
And tomatoes. If you are lucky enough to have a garden growing, you know very well the dusky smell of tomato leaves in the summer sun and the joy of picking a couple tomatoes from the vine, feeling their weight and warmth in your palm, then rinsing them under the hose, slicing them and sprinkling on salt. Are they a fruit or a vegetable? Yes! (For the record, a tomato is a fruit, but the whole point is that it rides that line like almost no other food.)
Caprese salad adds just three things to that preparation: mozzarella, basil and olive oil. That’s it. Its origin stories are as colorful as they are unverifiable. It might have been invented by a stonemason after World War I or maybe at the luxe Hotel Quisisana for a meal for members of the wacky Futurist movement. But in keeping with the simplicity of the dish, let’s stick with what we know. It originated in the 1920s in Capri, the resort island off the coast of Campania, the mother lode for mozzarella. Its colors mimic the tricolore, the three colors on the Italian flag (also seen in pizza Margherita).
If it’s so simple, what can you do to make it great? It’s Italian, so the beginning and the end of the dish are great ingredients, and here you really, really want the best. A big, red tomato that has never felt the kiss of the Frigidaire, bursting with ripeness. Fresh mozzarella made that day and also kept a safe distance from refrigeration so that it weeps whey when cut. Bright green, fragrant basil you can smell from 10 paces. Your absolute best olive oil. If any of these ingredients is lacking, the dish devolves from an embrace to a shrug. Oh, and a little sea salt, if you like.
There are people who like to put balsamic vinegar on Caprese. That’s kind of like the Henry Fonda line from the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West: “How can you trust a man who wears a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.” If the four main ingredients are great, adding anything else is a breach of trust. Please try it without balsamic and then add it only if you must.
When done right, Caprese is a case of 1+1+1+1=36. Rich, creamy, oozy mozzarella; sweet, acidic, juicy tomato slices; the almost licorice vegetal flavor of basil, and a good slick of bright olive oil merge to become something else entirely. People stop talking. But wait, it gets even better … .
Once you’ve eaten it all, and maybe some soppressata or prosciutto if you’re feeling peckish, there will be a beautiful pink, green and white puddle of drippings on the platter. Tear off a hunk of bread and start sopping.
What Wine Goes with Caprese Salad?
Sure, you could serve a light red, preferably chilled, but why would you? Rosé—that would be rosato in Italian—can work, especially ones with herbal or saline notes rather than floral. But it’s peak summer, so pull a bottle of white out of the icebox. In keeping with the pairing mantra “What grows together goes together,” we went Italian with our wine selections, with one pick from each of Campania’s three leading white grapes: Falanghina, Fiano and Greco.
A light- to medium-bodied white wine with refreshing acidity can cut through the rich cheese, though a good tomato is already doing the heavy lifting there. And racy acidity in the wine can essentially cancel the acidity in the tomato, making it sweeter. Look for herbal, vegetal and petrol notes to lift the basil. But don’t sweat the match too much since you are probably already sweating on your deck.
Our Editors’ Recommended White White Pairings
• Vivid and mineral-driven, the Mastroberardino Greco di Tufo Stilèma Riserva 2019 (93 points, $99) underscores a lovely range of baked pineapple, tangerine peel, crushed rosemary and creamed almond flavors with smoke, stone and petrol notes. Well-honed acidity firms the lightly chalky finish.
• A minerally white, the Fontanavecchia Falanghina del Sannio BjondoRe 2023 (90, $30) shows pretty aromatics of apple blossoms and Thai basil that accent the ripe yellow peach, blood orange granita and pink grapefruit zest notes. The wine’s light, pleasing plumpness is deftly defined by racy acidity.
• Refreshing and elegant, the San Salvatore Fiano Paestum Trentenare 2023 (90, $32) offers blood orange peel–infused acidity and a subtle thread of ground ginger and chamomile aromatics lacing the grainy pear, apricot and Marcona almond flavors.
Find more recommended Italian white wines in our Wine Ratings Search.
Recipe: How to Make Caprese Salad
Ingredients
- 1 ball fresh mozzarella, usually about a pound
- 1 large, fresh red tomato, about the same dimensions as the cheese
- Fresh basil
- Olive oil
- Sea salt, optional
Preparation
1. If possible, use a cutting board with gutters to catch juice. Use your sharpest knife. Cut the mozzarella in half, top to bottom. Cut each half into equally thick slices—around 3/8 to 1/2 inch, but the key is consistency. Place on a serving platter, not a cheese board.
2. Core the tomato and halve it stem to stern, then cut each half into slices, aiming for the same number and thickness as the mozzarella slices.
3. Fan the cheese so that the slices overlap a little, then slip a tomato slice between each. Next, tuck a basil leaf between each of them so that you have the alternating colors of the Italian flag.
4. Hopefully your cutting board is a mix of whey and tomato runoff at this point. If so, pour that over the mozzarella and tomato slices. If you’re adding salt, do so now, but just a bit; you can add more later, but you can’t take it away. Drizzle a liberal amount of olive oil over everything. Unlike the salt, you can’t really have too much oil. You’ll be dragging your bread through it later, after all. Serves four.
