Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

A Caprese Salad For The Winter Months

Unless you’re blessed with a budget for greenhouse-grown produce year-round, chances are that you’ll find yourself having to settle for mealy, lackluster tomatoes during the cold winter months.

But even the saddest tomatoes utterly transform after a quick roast in the oven. The sugars break down and caramelize, leaving you with a delicious sweet and tangy delight still fit (and pretty enough) for a salad. To call this a “recipe” is hardly fair — it’s more like a simple trick to save your your taste buds from the horrors of gristly winter tomatoes.

You can roast your tomatoes any way you’d like. The recipe below calls for topping with melted mozzarella, but at the suggestion of Chef Irene Yager, I made a version with minced garlic drizzled with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper at her Southern Italian cooking class at the Manhattan JCC.

To serve at Shabbat lunch, cook the tomatoes in advance and plate day-of. To chiffonade your basil, gather several leaves and roll tightly (like you’re rolling a joint, as one class participant remarked), then slice into thin ribbons.

Winter Caprese Salad

Recipe by Chef Irene Yager

1 loaf baguette, cut into ½-inch thick slices (about 30 to 36 slices)

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

5 Roma tomatoes, sliced

1 lb fresh mozzarella, sliced

1 bunch of fresh basil leaves, stemmed

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Roasting winter tomatoes allows the sugars to break down, removing the mealy taste and consistency. Image by Laura E. Adkins

1) Preheat the oven to 450˚ Fahrenheit. Spray a round glass baking dish with olive oil.

2) Place tomatoes in a single layer in the pan. Arrange sliced baguette on a separate baking sheet.

3) Top tomatoes with grated mozzarella (or olive oil and balsamic vinegar along with other spices).

4) Bake bread for 5 minutes, until golden and crisp. Bake tomatoes for 15 minutes, until cheese is melted and bubbly.

5) Arrange sliced mozzarella and tomatoes atop baguette slices. Serve with a drizzle of olive oil and pinch of basil.

Click here to enjoy other “secrets” to serving a perfect Italian Jewish meal.

Laura E. Adkins is the Forward’s deputy opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Laura_E_Adkins.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.