Welcome back to School of Rocco! Today we’re making my Italian BLT — Burrata, Lettuce & Tomato Salad — a summer-perfect dish featuring peak-season tomatoes, creamy burrata, fresh basil, and a rich tomato emulsion.
This recipe is all about simple, high-quality ingredients and big flavor — perfect for a light lunch, a dinner starter, or your next summer gathering.
Ingredients (2 portions):
• 2 heads baby lettuce (Gem, Bibb, or Little Gem)
• 4 large slices ripe heirloom tomato (300–400 g)
• 2 balls burrata cheese (100–115 g each)
• 10 fresh basil leaves
• 20 ml balsamic vinegar
• 40 ml extra-virgin olive oil
• Sea salt & freshly cracked black pepper to taste
Tomato Emulsion:
• 300 g overripe tomatoes
• 30 ml extra-virgin olive oil
• ½ clove garlic (2 g)
• 2 g sea salt
• Optional: 0.2 g xanthan gum (for stabilization)
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Okay, we’re going to make something I invented called the BLT. I mashed together three of my favorite things. Green salad, capray salad, and a BLT. So, instead of bacon, lettuce, and tomato, it’s burata, lettuce, and tomato. We’re going to start by slicing shallots. Definitely a great summer salad. You want to try to use super ripe inseason tomatoes. Here’s what you do. You take your large heirloom variety like this. Make sure it’s super ripe. And I can feel that these are. I like to mix up the tomatoes if I can. Little yellow, little red. And I’m cutting them super thick. And we’re going to season one at a time. We’re going to make sure each piece of this tomato is seasoned with salt, pepper, olive oil, all the ingredients. I like to put the shallots right on top of each tomato slice. This would obviously be a replacement for onions in this salad. Shallots are a little more mild. Uh you probably see them in the store and wonder what to do with them. Basically anywhere you’d use onion, green onion, even red onion, you can use shallots. And now we’re going to top it with red wine vinegar. Literally season each piece of tomato. So there’s no mistaking that every bite of tomato has delicious flavor. Olive oil. And again, you can turn all these ingredients into a vinegrett. If you wanted to, you could just throw that into a blender. All right, we’re going to start to build the salad like this. And you can already see that this salad is freaking delicious. Look at it. I mean, look at these tomatoes and the vinegar and the oil. And you know how that’s going to taste. Next, we cut the borata in half. This is a piece of fresh burata, which is mozzarella and cream, which are absolutely phenomenally delicious with tomatoes, of course, and basil. For the salad part of this, we’re going to mix together one of my favorite herbs. Lots of basil. I got about 10 12 pieces of basil in here. This is baby gem, which I happen to like a lot. We’re going to season this with salt, pepper, olive oil. I already did. Red wine vinegar. This is the dressing part of this. And notice I’m tossing the basil in with the salad because basil should be seasoned, too. You know, basil is essentially like a green leafy herb that requires seasoning just like lettuce. Taste. If you watch me cook and other prochef cook, you’ll notice that we taste our food a lot. It needs vinegar. It needs salt. All right. Toss, toss, toss. You just pile that on nice and high. To finish it, we’re going to top it with aged balsamic vinegar. You guys have heard of balsamic vinegar. It comes from Modina in Italy. It’s a vinegar that’s aged in a soler system. Ends up being nice and syrupy. Has a lot of really distinct flavor and will absolutely solidify the capray element, which is the tomato, cheese, basil. Let’s taste. I know you’re thinking, “But where’s the bacon? That’s my favorite part of the BLT. You know what? If you put a bunch of bacon on here right now, it’d be really good. Okay. A little bit of the bara. The bara does so much to carry this dish over the finish line. This for me is simple, elegant, go-to five night a week salad all summer long. Try it yourself.
1 Comment
I'm trying that! it looks amazing!!