Dinner at North

July 25, 2009  •  Restaurants

This is one of my rare posts when I have no photos to share of my cooking, no recipe I’ve created – just one of the best dining tips you’ll run across in a long time! When I was last in Italy, at The Awaiting Table cookery school in Puglia, I experienced one of the best cheeses I’ve ever tasted – burrata.You might not be able to pick it out easily from the ridiculously large cheese platter above (which 8-10 of us polished of AS A FIRST COURSE last year!) but it’s the creamy blob in the back.What makes burrata unique in the mozzarella world is the creamy center. When they make fresh mozzarella in large vats, there are plenty of stringy (but delicious) pieces of mozzarella left floating in the whey after they have scooped out the curds. The cheese maker gathers these up in a strainer, combines them with heavy cream, and here’s the genius, inserts them into the center of a ball of fresh mozzarella cheese so that when you cut it open it sinfully oozes out.On our last night in Puglia, when we got to select our own menu to make based on our lessons from the week, we immediately ran to the cheese man at the local market and bought out all the burrata they had to make a Caprese salad using this decadent cheese.

So fast forward to dinner at North tonight in Cherry Creek – after a week of packing my mother in law for her move, a full day with the movers loading up yesterday, and a full day of working her garage sale today, my husband had quite considerately lined up a dinner for just the two of us at North. And guess what was on the menu? You got it – a Caprese salad with burrata, heirloom tomatoes, and baby arugula accented with fruity extra virgin olive oil and a rich balsamic glaze, finished with an arugula pesto. Sorry I didn’t have my camera tonight – some rude tourist in Rome knocked it off the table where my son was sitting last week sipping vino when he finished his summer business program in Europe. (At least that’s the story we got when he arrived home with it shattered.) So you’ll just have to take my word for it and get to North quick to try this – come hungry!!!