Page 66 - The Hunt - Summer 2021

FOOD & DRINK
Shake up your traditional Caprese salad by swapping tomatoes for strawberries.
The other day, I sliced a fresh tomato onto the
same plate I’d earlier used at breakfast for a toasted everything bagel. In the process, some of the leftover poppy seeds on the saucer imbedded themselves into the tomato slices, which turned out to be a tasty combination.
For dinner that evening, I prepared a standard Caprese salad with tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil, then sprinkled some toasted poppy seeds on top. It was a simple example of what the region’s chefs do routinely when they update classic recipes and upgrade comfort food. It’s something home cooks should do more of. Our dinner tables demand menu makeovers as surely as our living rooms need occasional redecorating.
Sometimes these makeovers are accidental. Sometimes they’re the result of a carefully thought-out process. Sometimes it’s simply because we don’t have the right ingredient on hand—like the time I was making pesto and found myself short of fresh basil. I added a large handful of leftover green peas into the blender, and I hit on a slightly nuanced and much creamier pesto—still true to the dish, but just a little different in taste and texture. “I’m constantly revisiting dishes, be they comfort foods, classics or ethnic
gems,” says Delaware-based chef Robert Lhulier, who hosts his own private dinners and has a catering business. “Once you begin to view constructing dishes in this manner, you find that what you’re doing is just riffing on proven classics. We like them instantly because they’re familiar and still feel new. And we all like new things.”
It’s an interesting concept to consider—home chefs creating the way a jazz pianist or sax player takes a familiar tune and uses it as a starting point for exploration before returning
to the well-known for the finish. It may depend on our disposition at the time as to whether we feel the song has been refreshed or violated. The same is true with a favorite dish.
Lhulier, as it turns out, was also thinking about Caprese,
but only as a starting point. “Take as an example the classic salad, insalata Caprese—mozzarella, tomato, basil, balsamic, sometimes pesto,” he says. “I love this salad, but we only get great tomatoes around these parts six weeks of the year. So, beginning in May, sometimes I substitute the tomato—a fruit—for something equally fresh, ripe and seasonal, like strawberries.”
Lhulier notes that you can make pesto from any herb or green. “So maybe I’ll make arugula pesto and then switch
64 THE HUNT MAGAZINE summer 2021
By Roger Morris
Refresher Courses
Are your go-to dishes tasting too far gone? Here’s how chefs regain that zip.