I don’t post about food very often, but it’s one of the great joys in my life and I’ve written a few times about it before. Last week I happened to have an appetizer at what amounts to my local diner, and it was both delicious and well-presented. It was a take on insalata caprese, which is a salad of basil, tomato, and mozzarella. In this case, however, watermelon was used, and then the salad was drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Hadn’t seen that before but it was delicious. I decided to re-create it at home a couple nights later, and these are the results.

Duplicating it is easy. Ingredients:

* Watermelon.
* Fresh mozzarella. Get buffalo mozzarella if your local market has it. Slice it about 1/8-1/4 inch thick. Fresh, incidentally, will come soaking in liquid most likely. If it’s shrink-wrapped, it’s not what you want though maybe it’d work. I’m just not going to spend the money to find out, since shrink-wrapped food generally sucks.
* Italian or Genovese Basil. Fresh only, of course.
* Balsamic vinegar. You need the real stuff here. You want the label to read ‘Aceto Balsamico di Modena’. You want it to be aged a minimum of 6 years. I use balsamic aged 25 years at home and it pours like syrup, because it’s had 25 years for liquid to slowly evaporate off while it sits in barrels. It’s got this incredibly complex sweetness to it. A few drops are all you want to use, because it will overwhelm most foods. Try drizzling a few drops on top of good parmesan reggiano.

Cut out rounds of watermelon. If you have cookie cutters, use round ones. I don’t, so I used a round 1-cup measuring cup, and bent the metal handle up so that when I turned it upside down the handle didn’t interfere.

I used three rounds per salad, and stacked it watermelon - basil - mozzarella - basil - watermelon - basil - mozzarella - basil - watermelon - basil - mozarella. I also put a couple thin peelings of lemon zest (rind) on top as decoration, to add a little color.

Then I simply drizzled with a little bit of good balsamic, and enjoyed. If you want to make your presentation a little nicer, try just alternating the basil leaves (I used a single one for each layer listed above) at 90 degree angles every layer.
Watermelon Caprese