Chef Dewayne Rose: First dish we’re going to be making today is a heirloom tomato with our fresh buffalo mozzarella cheese.

Heirloom tomatoes are at this time, at the summer, they are great, full of flavor, nice and sweet. They come in different variety, different colors. They have in hot, bright yellow, some are off green. This is actually a little bit—this is a vine ripened tomato, not a heirloom tomato. They come in greens. They got them in purple. They come in all different color but they’re great for salads especially the salad that I’ll be making for you today.

So, why don’t we start at it. We’ll use some fresh garlic so we get our dressing out of the way, and the fresh garlic, that’s about a tablespoon. Well, a little bit more, okay. We’re going to use some extra virgin olive oil. Olive oil is always good to cook with. It’s good for you, great flavor, and it has a great taste to it. It’s just wonderful stuff to use. I can drink this stuff all day if you’ll let me but I’m going to put about eight ounces of olive oil in this blend. Then we’re going to make an emulsion. An emulsion is a temporary sauce. We try to take unlike items and try to blend them together and they sometime—they won’t even fuse together, but we’re going to try and see what happens.

If you add equal parts it should temporary emulsify not for long. If you take them into a blender and it definitely will emulsify because this it is going with more—okay, that’s about right.

Okay now, when you use olive oil, you want to use also good salt, good sea salt, kosher salt is wonderful. I don’t advice when you make salad to use iodize salt, that’s just too fine and it’s very hard to control. It’s very concentrated and when you put it in other items, it becomes very salty if you don’t apply it properly, so a kosher salt, a sea salt is very good to use. When you use a little bit of kosher salt and pick some in the store, maybe a $1.50 for the bucks, it’s about three pounds in the bucks. A little bit of pepper, small amount of pepper. I would blend this and we’re going to let this sit for a minute.

Okay, whenever you handle a fresh product, it’s good to kind of rinse them off nicely. Get off anyone touching them before they’d go to the store, you know, get all that off of them. Also, when the fresh tomato is not so much but other tomatoes, they put a wax on outside of a lot of the food product, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants. A lot of those items, they’d always coat them so they preserve them, so they stay a bit longer. If not, you go to the store and the product goes there and they’ll set for a couple of days and it goes bad, so then you have caused problem. So, we’ll get all that off of them. Does anyone have a garden? Plant some of this in the summer time? Great!

Female: What did you mix with the oil?

Chef Dewayne Rose: Balsamic vinegar.

Female: Okay.

Chef Dewayne Rose: And some fresh garlic. Now, you don’t have to use heirloom tomato when you’re making this particular dish. I chose to use heirloom tomatoes. You can use regular tomatoes. If you want to use Roma’s, it’d great, teardrop tomatoes, cherry tomatoes are just good, okay.

Once I get the tips off the tomato where they attached to the vine, you can use a—in the culinary field we call, it’s a little device called shark because it has a lot of teeth around use to put in and take it right up, or if not you can just use your knife. Go right on it. Be careful, don’t cut yourself.

Okay, we’re going to do some nice wedges out of this. Cut them nicely. And if you are doing the cherry tomatoes, you just cut them in half and they’re pretty simple, nice bite size pieces. Don’t cut yourself. I’ve been doing this for quite sometimes, so I know where my knife is located. Your knife is your best friend.

Now, we got all this wonderful color and the sauce and flavor going on here, just take a spoon and mix it up a little bit, these tomatoes also. That’s the part of heirloom tomatoes. Put another one in there. Yes, I think they call these are tiger high or something to that effect, I quite remember. But green tomatoes have been around for quite sometime. People like to fry them and do different things out of them.

The Spanish cuisine asks a green tomato so it’s a little bit different than your regular tomato, it’s called Tomatillo. And they use that to make their salsas and chile verdes and those wonderful items, great product to use.

Now, the Buffalo Mozzarella cheese, you can pick up at any supermarket also. They come in different size. If you ever gone out to an Italian restaurant and they served you caprice salad, this is very similar to a caprice salad, so there’s different method and different preparation. The caprice salad normally, they slice the buffalo mozzarella. This, they come in, it’s a little bit little smaller portions, so just take a few of this put them in there, the great taste, they don’t—they really pretty much take on whatever you put them in the flavor of that particular dish, but they are wonderful in taste.

Now, we’re going to add all the garlic. We got to add all that wonderful things in there now. So, let that sit for a minute. Most important to give this, it’s really, really a unique flavor is fresh basil. Fresh basil you can pick up. You go to—where was that the other day? Sears? And they have big pots. All over the place, they have them. And you can pick up. I see they have a little place where they do flowers. You can pick up a pickle of pot. You can get the seeds, plant them outside in your garden, a great flavor. There are different kinds of basil out there. You’ve got purple basil. You’ve got Thai basil. You’ve got mint basil. There are just so many different flavors. This is more of your common basil that you’ll see in cooking all the time. So, it’s an Italian basil, great flavor. Put a sprinkle a little bit of basil in there.

Now, I like green onion to my salad, so I’m going to add a little bit of green onions to the dish. If you like good breads in the summer time, you take some Italian hard bread preferably ciabatta, brush it with some of the olive oil, grill it off from the grill, and you can dice this up finely and put right on the bread. It becomes a porchetta, or you can take mushrooms, roast them off and put them on the grill and chop them up finely with garlic, olive oil, and also—or you can put it in the blender. Make a little moose out of it and put it on the bread. It comes out very nice. I won’t cut myself. I love myself too much to cut myself, I promise you.

Female: How do you rub them in—

Chef Dewayne Rose: You can rub them with a little bit of olive oil, put some salt and then keep the flavors similar, don’t put anything out of the dish that, you know, that was not in there before, okay.

Now, you can also sprinkle a little bit of sugar in there if you want to, just a tat, not much and that’s optional, but some people think tomatoes are little bit too tart so there’s a tendency I will add sugar to it. Okay, now that’s it. I had some greens, any mixture is fine. Spring mix, micro greens, salad mix. Let’s put little greens at the bottom. And you can arrange your salad. Put some of the yellow ones, get some of the green ones, put them on there, get some of the cheese and get some of the sauce, put right over it, very simple.

Now, the wholly trick—the key thing in food preparation is presentation. People eat with their eyes. If it doesn’t look good, chances are someone might not eat it even the taste is wonderful as possible. So, there you go. That is your heirloom tomato with buffalo mozzarella cheese with extra virgin olive oil.