I love the combination of fresh mozzarella cheese with tomatoes and basil but unfortunately a lot of bad restaurants have found a cheap way to capitalize on a perfect combination of flavor by using poor and out of season ingredients. Let’s be honest if you order a Caprese salad in 80% of the restaurants in New York at best you are going to get a mediocre reproduction with bland tomatoes.

In the top 20% of the restaurants where a Caprese salad is done right, the best available ingredients are assembled in such a way that it’s easy to know that something special is going immediately after your first bite. I’m not going to wax poetic about how I make my sandwiches I’m just going to tell you the ingredients that I recommend using if you either want to reproduce a perfect Caprese sandwich or salad.

Most importantly, you have to use fresh mozzarella cheese, if it comes in a bag or if it’s in the “cheese” section at your local “Dagastino’s” it just won’t due. I like buying my Mozzarella cheese at Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street, you might get your balls broken a little bit or pay a little extra but for me it’s the only place to go.

I cop baby basil and heirloom tomatoes at the Union Square Farmer’s Market. There are other markets in the city where you can get some pretty great produce but walking through the farmer’s market and chatting with farmers and finding new herbs and perfectly ripe stone fruit has become a favorite hobby of mine and something I love to do. I made the sandwich pictured a few months back when the heavenly, heirloom tomatoes were in peak season and sadly admit that it would almost impossible to find tomatoes as good as those to make this sandwich with in the late fall and early winter months. It’s the same reason that the heirloom tomato BLT at ‘wichcraft is only available for a short window of time every year, either they make it with heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market or they don’t make it all.

There are plenty of great places to purchase freshly baked bread in NYC and the bakery at Balthazar , Amy’s Bread and a few places in Little Italy our amongst my favorites. When I’m out to impress or am making something special I get my bread from the incomporable Sullivan Street Bakery in Hell’s Kitchen and when I’m making a sandwich I pick out their “candelini” loaf which is shaped like a mini baguette and has a light brown crust.

Dressing this sandwich might be the most important part of the final product and I suggest a light dusting or Sicilian sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Of course you have to splash a little bit of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the finished product and you could do a lot worse then Tenuta di Capezzana olive oil from Carmignano and Maletti Aceto’s Balsamico di Modena from Soliera.

Get those basic products and I promise you that you’ll have to try very hard to screw this sandwich up.

Filed under: Diner For One, Sandwiches Tagged: | 'wichcraft, Amy's Bread, Balthazar Bakery, basil, candelini loaf, carmignano, Dinner For One, freshly cracked black pepper, Heirloom tomato BLT, Heirloom Tomatoes, Hell's Kitchen, Joe's Dairy, Little Italy, Maletti Aceto's Balsamico Di Modena, Max's Caprese Sandwich, mozzarella cheese, sicilian sea salt, Soliera, stone fruit, Sullivan Street, Sullivan Street Bakery, tenuta di capezzana olive oil, Union Square Farmer's Market