A recipe for a festive and delicious appetizer or salad wreath made with mozzarella pearls, cherry tomatoes, basil, arugula, hazelnuts, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.
Caprese Holiday Wreath Appetizer (or Salad)
Course: SaladsCuisine: Italian4
servings30
minutesIngredients
8 oz. mozzerella pearls
Best-quality olive oil
Dried oregano and thyme (optional)
Red pepper flakes (optional)
6-7½ oz. basil
2½ oz. baby arugula (optional)
1 pint cherry tomatoes, some of them halved
1/4 cup hazelnuts
Best-quality balsamic vinegar
Directions
- (Toss the pearls very lightly with oil, herbs, and red pepper. Set aside.)
- Place an inverted, 5-inch-diameter bowl in the center of a 14-inch-diameter, round serving plate. Choose the prettiest basil leaves and arrange them on the plate with the (arugula), tomatoes and cheese. (You may not need all the basil.) Stud the wreath with hazelnuts. At this point, the wreath can be covered with plastic wrap and refrigerated until serving time. You may have to zhuzh it a bit after removing the plastic.
- Remove the inverted bowl. Drizzle the wreath with oil. Sprinkle with flaked salt and coarsely cracked pepper. Place the balsamic nearby, or decant some into a small, attractive container and place it into the center of the wreath with a small serving spoon.
Notes
- Substitutions: baby spinach for the arugula
Intro
How many ways are there to make a holiday wreath appetizer? Google found took just 0.27 seconds to find seventy-eight thousand of them. I’ve reviewed them all and have produced the best one. Or did I just stumble onto one of them while scrolling through Instagram, and decided to make it? You decide.
Social Learning
Tips & Tricks
If you decide to dress the pearls, do it very, very lightly. I think the appetizer tastes better this way. However, undressed pearls are maybe prettier.
This is the time to use your best olive oil. If all you have is the kind you cook with, go out and splurge on something more refined. I used a lemon-infused oil from Sonoma Pantry, and it was fantastic with the other ingredients. The same goes for the balsamic: it should be exceptional. I used an 18-year-old balsamic from Olive & Well. None of my guests seemed to want vinegar, though, which I thought was crazy.
Ideas for Further Cooking
You could make a wreath in this way out of just about anything. It’s hard for me to imagine a salad that couldn’t be arranged in this fashion, for instance, or a charcuterie. I mean, even an assortment of cookies.
The Backstory
I can always trust my go-to grocery store to be out of basil when I most want it. Whole Foods always seems to have plenty. Basil, especially in these amounts, is expensive. You can make the wreath less expensive – but no less delicious, imho – by using a mixture of basil and arugula. If you do, you’ll have more of a salad on your hands than you do an appetizer, which may or may not be desirable, depending on what you have in mind. Another alternative would be to increase the amount of tomato and cheese rather dramatically and use a much smaller amount of basil to accentuate the wreath.
Caprese Holiday Wreath Appetizer (or Salad)
Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! unless otherwise credited. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. References: Market Basket, No Biggie, Simple Healthy Kitchen, Simply Scratch. Thank you, Kesor. Make It Like a Man! is ranked by Feedspot as #15 in the Top 30 Men’s Cooking Blogs.
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