Though a classic Caprese salad is beautiful as is, Giada De Laurentiis just one-upped the traditional Italian dish. Dubbed the “Mosaic” Caprese Salad, your guests won’t know whether to eat this side dish or pay you admission to an art museum.
De Laurentiis shared a video of the salad on June 3 to her Instagram. She shared it with the caption reading, “Not only is this a visually beautifully way to prepare a salad, but it’s a delicious way to make use of summer produce. With no cooking required, all you need to do is ensure that you cut all of the ingredients in the same size and shape for the full visual effect. It’s a perfect recipe to practice your knife skills! Tap the link in our bio for our Watermelon Caprese Salad Recipe!”
To make the Mosaic Caprese, De Laurentiis starts by cubing up her fruits, veggies, and cheese. For this dish, she used watermelon, honeydew, cherry tomato (which she just cut in half), and mozzarella cheese, but feel free to alter your ingredients to fit your taste — cucumber or mango, for example, might be tasty in this salad, too!
The trick is to cube all your ingredients to roughly the same size to make sure your mosaic comes together uniformly. As De Laurentiis writes on her website, this is the perfect recipe to practice your knife skills.
Assemble your cubed ingredients in a mosaic pattern on a large plate and top with chopped basil, salt, pepper, and olive oil. As followers mentioned in the comments, balsamic vinegar or glaze would add a nice zest, too. And when it’s time to serve, you can either mix all the cubes together or serve with a wide spatula to keep the mosaic in place!
This entire salad comes together in just about 20 minutes and there’s no need to turn the oven on, making it a perfect summer meal. You can check out the full recipe over on Giadzy.
Before you go, check out our roundup of summer cocktails below:
