Is a Caprese worth it?

   So The Table Catering features an appetizer that is a Caprese Skewer.  And I want to write about why that is. Only because if we don’t question everything, we won’t understand the intent behind the choices made to put items together on a menu.  

Caprese Salads are everywhere. They represent the colors of the Italian flag, and that really shouldn’t be why we eat things.  The dish is also named after the island it apparently originated from, the island called Capri located in the Compania region of Italy right off the coast, and its name most likely came from old Greek for wild boar. Growing up in San Diego, I often heard of wild boar roaming around the Catalina Islands when my brothers came back from boy scout camping trips so I can see how that makes sense to name a place after a huge wildlife outbreak of an animal.  But also doesn’t really give good context as to why other than it snazzy and it tastes good. And I am fine with that. Caprese salads taste good together.

There is fatty fresh soft mozzarella paired with rich acidic ripe tomatoes along with rough herbacieous aromatic basil and modified with a reduction of tart and sweet sticky basil for our purposes.

Four common and found mostly everywhere ingredients that can showcase when in season, mostly well because of tomatoes. And not within season, sun dried, or perhaps people just get what the can at their store of choice. 

So how do you make a caprese shine? Well, with seasonal locality and growing.  I have made moz a few times. It only gets better when the milk is sourced from a small herd of cows in which you know their lifestyle. And even then the nuance of flavor is only perceived if you know what you are looking for. It’s great, and I would love to have always access, but it is a process and does not fit well for business models to pay back all the labor involved in small batches. Fortunately, there are great dairies in the bay area that make great fresh mozzarella.

Then there are the tomatoes.  Never refrigerated and picked the week of make for the fullest fruit flavor.  But tomatoes have such a spectrum from organic ones grown in Mexico to backyard varietals.  I love the ones grown at home the most.

And basil is something I wish everyone would grow.  There is some maintenance but the home grown leaves are just thicker and more robust than what I see at the market.  And for caprese skewers you don’t need much. 

Caprese Skewers are a way to showcase what simple foods might be in your area that are being produced in a way to showcase and shine. And the ingredients should be heralded to the consumers in a way to honor and respect where they came from so that the flavors are recognized by their sources of who is helping bring it together.