Nectarine and Tomato Salad with Buffalo Mozzarella

Wow, unexpected! I really enjoyed this salad, which actually is a kind of elaborate Salad Caprese: tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, nectarines and garlic. Yes, you read right, nectarines and garlic, and it was especially this combination that blew my mind. It worked extraordinarily well!

Something else that made this salad outstanding is the recipe for basil oil hidden in the instructions - a great recipe to use for any salad, with pasta, or just to dip bread.

We actually used wild peaches instead of nectarines, though - partly due to availability, but partly also because they were just ripe, yet still on the hard side, and therefore not very sweet - DH was worried that really ripe fruit would be too sweet for this salad. For him, this issue remained, he didn't like the combination of mozzarella with sweet fruit, and suggested to use goat's cheese instead. I'm not always that much of a fan of goat's cheese, but I could see a blue cheese working here, as blue cheese often works well with fruit.

Another issue DH had with this salad (he was the cook today) was that it was pretty vague on the amounts of ingredients. Yes, it said '12 heirloom tomatoes', but even the tomatoes shown in the photo were so diverge in size that you could probably mean anything from 150g (cocktail sized ones) to 1500g (larges ones) - and the correct amount does matter to mak the salad balanced.

Although you can serve this with some bread as a main dish on a warm summer night, I would rather recommend it as a starter on ditto warm summer night. This is a Skye Gyngell recipe, by the way.