Ischia-style Mozzarella with Basil

Pair buffalo’s milk mozzarella with a delicate tomato sauce to make a satisfying salad.

  • Time

    20 minutes

  • Difficulty

    Easy

  • Course

    Appetizers

  • Italian Region

    Campania

Ingredients

Servings 4

For tomato sauce

  • ½ lb tomatoes
  • 5 oz green tomatoes
  • ⅜ oz vinegar
  • ⅛ oz chives, fresh
  • ½ celery heart
  • 7 oz extra virgin olive oil
  • salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

20 minutes preparation

Wash and clean the tomatoes, celery and chives, then puree them in a blender with vinegar and 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil. Puree until smooth.

Then season with salt and pepper and continue to puree, slowly adding the remaining olive oil. Continue to puree until you have a nicely whipped sauce.

Wash and finely chop the largest basil leaves. Drain the mozzarella of its water and cut it into 1/5 inch slices.

Arrange your salad on a single serving dish by placing the mozzarella on a bed of tomato sauce and garnishing it with basil. If you prefer to serve the salad on individual plates, place 2 ½ tbsp sauce on each plate and arrange three slices of mozzarella one top, one next to another. Garnish with chopped basil and a couple of small, whole leaves.

Serve your fresh Ischia-style salad.

Food History

Although tomatoes are considered a fundamental part of Italian cuisine – just think of pizza Margherita or spaghetti with tomato sauce, they were not well received by Italian at first and their popularity grew slowly. The first tomato plants were brought to Europe in the 16th century by Cortès and initially the fruit was considered poisonous due to the solanine in them. For some time, in fact, tomatoes were used only as decoration. People began to consume tomatoes probably due to the scarcity of food. The poor gradually began to eat them fried in oil and seasoned with salt and pepper, exactly how they prepared eggplants, another vegetable rich in solanine and considered unpopular for a long period of time. Around the middle of the 18th century the recipe for tomato sauce was brought to Italy from Spain. The recipe appears in Vicenzo Corrado’s book “Il cuoco galante”. This preparation proved popular and spread across the Italian peninsula. Since the 19th century, it has been paired with pasta and pizza to ultimately become a symbol of Italian cuisine.

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