Grilled Chicken Caprese With Buffalo Mozzarella Cheese

Clay came home from camp on Friday with a bruise on his shoulder the size of a softball and the confidence of a man twice his age. He said the coaches told him he could play college ball if he wanted it. Not Division I — he's good but he's not that good, and I'd rather he hear that from me than from a recruiter — but Division II, maybe. A scholarship. A chance to play and get an education at the same time. Craig Hensley's son, playing college football on a scholarship. If you'd told Earl that, he would've nodded once and gone back to his coffee, which was his way of saying he was pleased beyond words.

This week I want to talk about something that isn't a recipe, exactly, but is about food: the garden. Connie and I have a small garden in the backyard — maybe ten feet by twenty feet, which is a postage stamp compared to Betty's half-acre in Evarts. We've got tomatoes, peppers, green beans, a few hills of squash, and some herbs that Connie planted because she read about herb gardens in a magazine. The tomatoes are starting to come in. Early Girls, which are aptly named — they're the first to ripen, usually by late July, and they're not the best-tasting tomato in the world but they're a tomato and it's July and the first tomato of summer is like the first day of school or the first snowfall: it matters because it's first, not because it's best.

I picked three Early Girls on Saturday and I ate one standing in the garden with salt, the way God intended. You don't need a plate. You don't need bread. You need a tomato and salt and a willingness to get juice on your shirt. The other two I sliced and put on a plate with cottage cheese, which is how Betty ate garden tomatoes for lunch every day in summer. Sliced tomatoes, cottage cheese, salt, pepper. That's lunch. That's enough. In a world that's always telling you to add more ingredients and more steps and more complexity, sometimes the radical act is to eat a tomato with salt and say that's enough.

Betty's garden in Evarts was something else entirely. Half an acre on a hillside, terraced with flat rocks that Earl hauled from the creek bed. Tomatoes, beans, corn, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, onions, peppers, cabbage, lettuce in the spring. She canned everything she couldn't eat fresh — jars of green beans, jars of tomatoes, jars of pickles, jars of sauerkraut from the cabbage. The pantry in the company house had shelves from floor to ceiling, and by September those shelves were full. That was winter's food. That was survival. Betty's garden wasn't a hobby. It was the difference between eating and not eating, and she treated it with the seriousness of a woman who understood that the ground was the only thing between her family and hunger.

My garden is a hobby. I know that. I have Kroger. I have money, not much, but enough to buy tomatoes in January if I want them, which I don't because January tomatoes are a crime against nature but theoretically I could. The garden is not survival for me. It's connection. It's my hands in the same dirt that Betty's hands were in, growing the same things she grew, for the same reason she grew them: because food you grow yourself tastes like the person you want to be.

After eating that first Early Girl standing in the garden with nothing but salt, I wanted dinner to honor the same idea — let the tomato lead, don’t bury it. Caprese is really just the Italian version of what Betty was doing all along: fresh tomato, fresh cheese, a little something to tie it together, and the good sense to stop there. Adding grilled chicken makes it a meal Connie will actually sit down to, but the tomato is still the point.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 15 min | Total Time: 30 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 6 oz each)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon dried Italian seasoning
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
2 large ripe garden tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick
8 oz fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves
2 tablespoons balsamic glaze
Flaky sea salt, for finishing

Instructions

Pound and prep. Place chicken breasts between two sheets of plastic wrap and pound to an even 3/4-inch thickness so they cook through without drying out.
Season. Brush both sides of each breast with olive oil, then season evenly with garlic powder, Italian seasoning, kosher salt, and black pepper.
Heat the grill. Preheat an outdoor grill or grill pan over medium-high heat. Oil the grates lightly with a folded paper towel dipped in oil.
Grill the chicken. Cook chicken 6–7 minutes per side, until grill marks are deep and the internal temperature reaches 165°F. Do not press down on the breasts while they cook.
Rest. Transfer chicken to a cutting board and let rest 5 minutes. This keeps the juices in the meat where they belong.
Top and finish. Lay two slices of tomato on each chicken breast, then layer on the buffalo mozzarella. The residual heat will soften the cheese just enough. Scatter fresh basil leaves over the top.
Plate and drizzle. Transfer to plates or a serving platter, drizzle with balsamic glaze, and finish with a pinch of flaky sea salt. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Grilled Chicken Caprese With Buffalo Mozzarella Cheese — The Tomato Is Enough