Last Memorial Day, we hosted a small BBQ. Well, I should call it a BakeQ since I just baked all or the meat instead of grilling. I was making a few different types of sliders. I like sliders because it gives you the variety of eating different burgers or sandwiches in one meal! I had made regular angus sliders, thick sliced turkey sliders, and thought about some chicken nugget sliders, but held off on that for another day.
I had a vegetarian coming by so I wanted to make sure I had an option without meat. I'm a big meat eater, but it wound up being a great experiment and something I'm going to add to my future slider bake offs. Very simple, Italian classic and worked out great with the sweetness of King's Hawaiian bread.
Very simple if you're not aware. I've become an Italianerd while researching my ancestors from Salerno. I mention that specifically because the origin of caprese, or carpi-style is thought to be coming from the Italian region of Campagna - hey! That's where my family is from! Hooray! Oh yeah, and to prove that the country has been full of Italianerds just like myself, of course the colors of the 3 ingredients are green, white and red, basil, mozza and tomato. Just in case another country wants to take the credit. Like Germany.. which I guess would be blood sausage resting on ketchup and mustard? Hmm.I digress like normal. So building these are pretty easy, you just need some fresh basil, roma tomatoes, sliced mozzarella cheese and King's Hawaiian rolls. Most of these are found pretty readily at your nearest store. For my bakeBQs, I usually will get the large sliced packages of mozzarella from Costco so I have plenty to use. At the grocery stores, you can usually find the real basil plant and I always get one of those, wash the leaves and build with that. Being in Arizona, it's pretty hard to find fresh ingredients so I work with the best that I can find.
- bottom half of King's Hawaiian bread
- fresh washed bed of basil
- slice of mozzarella cheese
- slice of roma tomatoes (I like them thick - online people say they're too thick but I don't care)
- drizzle some good balsamic vinaigrette (I get from Costco, but there are many good ones)
- top part of King's Hawaiian bread
On day, I'll have to get the ingredients together in Italy and try with some of the best ingredients to really blow my mind. Let's see if I remember to post an update...