Locally Grown Tomatoes Say Summer!

Whether you buy them from your farmers’ market or grow them yourself, richly flavored tomatoes are summer’s gift. One way to take advantage of this bounty is to make the incredibly simple but oh, so delicious dish variously known as pasta caprese, fresh tomato pasta, or summer pasta. Whatever you call it, the ingredients are the same: tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and garlic. The success of the recipe rests in their quality. Each must be bursting with flavor, so please, no cardboard-tasting supermarket tomatoes or dried basil from a dusty corner of the spice shelf.

Outside of the quality of the ingredients, you’ve got a lot of lee way here. Tweak the recipe to your taste, but don’t complicate it. Some say seed or peel the tomatoes; I say why bother. And it’s best at room temperature. Heated, the mozzarella can turn to rubbery strings. Chilled, it becomes a slick salad of muted flavor.

Here are rough proportions for 6 servings.

Place ½ C olive oil in a large bowl.

Finely chop or mince cloves of garlic. I only use a couple but my Italian friend Donna would throw in half a dozen. Stir the garlic into the olive oil.

Stack several fresh, good-sized basil leaves, a dozen or more, and cut them crosswise into little ribbons. Drop into the olive oil.

At this point, you can proceed or set the bowl aside, even for several hours. In fact, it will benefit from letting the basil and garlic flavors develop in the olive oil for a while. Do not refrigerate!

Sometime within an hour or two of meal time, chop six or seven of those lovely big tomatoes into bite-sized pieces and put them along with their juices into the bowl.

When you’re ready to eat, or fairly close to it, cook a pound of pasta. Use any kind with a short stubby shape like penne or rigatoni or fusilli. When it is al dente, drain it, sprinkle with salt and grinds of pepper, then dump it into the tomatoes and oil and stir everything together.

Cut a pound of fresh mozzarella into small cubes and gently mix them in.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve this in bowls so the juices puddle in the bottom and you can mop them up with a good chewy sour dough bread. I like to grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top and sprinkle with extra basil. You also could get cute and throw on a few pine nuts but you don’t need to.

This dish can stand up to a light to medium bodied red wine, but a chilled crisp white seems more summery. Serve it as a company meal or an indulgent solitary repast, but enjoy it often while summer and the tomatoes last.