Pasta Caprese

Chapter 12: Who Wants Pasta? - Page 193
Time: ~30 minutes
Cost: ~$15 (if you grow your own tomatoes and basil, it’s much cheaper and tastier)
Serves: 4

Drew's Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
We make this all the time, and it’s always really good.

Sara's Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
I love this in the summer with fresh tomatoes. It’s easy and attractive to serve for company. It’s also really tasty as a cold lunch the next day!

First off, my apologies for the month delay in postings. I procrastinated, then we went on vacation, then I started a new job, and I’m just now catching up on the 3 more blog recipes we made at the end of June. Look for Sautéed Chicken Cutlets and Enchiladas Verde coming up soon!

Pasta Caprese is a favorite in our house. We made it for the first time a few years ago and loved how easy and delicious it was. It makes a big bowl for 4 nice servings, but it’s so addicting it’s easy to plow through the whole thing with just 2 or 3 people. The ingredients are about as simple as it gets: fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil and pasta are pretty much it in a nutshell, with some added flavor from garlic, shallots, and lemon juice. As with many simple recipes, ingredient quality is a key factor. If you have lousy tomatoes and dried basil, this recipe will be a dud.

This is one of those great pasta dishes where you can finish in just about the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta. The most time consuming piece of this, and what bumps it up to a half hour, is the coring, seeding, and dicing of the tomatoes. This always seems to take me twice as long as I imagine it will, and I can pretty much guarantee that tomato guts will end up on the floor next to the garbage can. Hopefully you have better sous chef skills than I do!

The diced up tomatoes marinate in a mixture of extra-virgin olive oil, shallot, garlic, lemon juice, and a little salt and pepper. While the tomatoes are enjoying their swim, the mozzarella gets diced and thrown in the deep freeze. The step of freezing the mozzarella is a big secret to success in the recipe, so you don’t end up with one giant ball of stringy mozzarella in the middle of a pound of pasta. When the pasta is done, all the ingredients get tossed together along with the basil to make a lovely room temperature dish. The frozen mozzarella is softened just enough from the heat of the pasta to make soft pillows throughout the bowl. Serve the bowls with some nice crusty bread and you have a great summer dish. The leftovers are great as well, as the pasta tastes pretty good cold out of the refrigerator.