Ahh ... Caprese

For a tomato junkie like me, nothing says "summer" quite so well as a caprese salad, particularly if the tomatoes and basil come straight from my own garden, still warm from the sun. Fresh. Delightful. Delicious.

Alas, for the rest of the year, caprese represents a particularly cruel kind of bait-and-switch: a hint of summer, a taste, a tease, a mirage that evaporates with the first bite of tough, bland, and mealy tomato. And yet still I order it at restaurants small and great, hoping, somehow, that this time, it will be something more than merely disappointing.

Take Setebello, for instance, a recently opened Neapolitan-style pizzeria in downtown Salt Lake. Good, smoky, woodfired pizzas with fresh ingredients. "Okay," I ask the waitress, "How are the tomatoes in the caprese?" "Good," she replies, "Everything here is good." But they are not: watery, tasteless tomatoes (all-too-typical winter tomatoes), coupled with a decent buffalo mozzarella and a few measly sprigs of basil.

But, tomato lovers take note: deliverance is here. A perfect, vine ripened summer tomato in January? Hardly, but pretty darn close. In a word: Campari. They sell them at Costco, and they are far and away the best store bought tomato I've found, particularly off-season. Firm, tangy, and sweet.

Pair them with a good, fresh, hand pulled mozarella (no easy find that, either, but available at most specialty stores; the local Costco sells a reasonably good one under the Bel Gioso label), a liberal helping of basil (I like it cut crosswise into thin strips), a good sea salt, cracked pepper, and a splash of good olive oil and, if you like, basalmic vinegar, and--voila!--a bite of summer, no matter how cold and bleak it may be outside. Winter, snow, and freezing rain ... I scoff at you! It is summer. I am in Southern Italy. The breeze is soft, and sun is warm. Life is good. I have caprese.