We’ve got a nice year-round farmers’ market in Montreal near Jean-Talon metro. It’s about a 45 minute walk from our place, and so we started out early Sunday morning to beat the humidity and crowds, check out the wares--coffee in hand and pockets stuffed with actual paper money.
Frankly speaking, I love a market, but I almost hate going to them. Maybe it’d be different if you lived right next to it, but if you go just once in while I find I’m always coming away with more food than I can cook, and oftentimes weird (though tasty) odds and ends, at that.
This weekend was much the same, we went in with one idea and came away with beef. Let me backtrack.
It was the last day before I was about to head out of town, and so the idea was nice walk, browse the stalls, get some nice, juicy tomatoes for a simple salad, and a random fish to eat alongside. No leftovers! The plan involved drinking wine on the porch, and maybe even had space for a nap.
We managed all of it, but made the walk back burdened with three bags full of food, including nearly a kilo of marinated rib steak. I mean Fred Flintstone steak. A hunk of meat on a bone.
There’s a restaurant we’ve been to twice now on subsequent trips to New York: Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, the grander Il Buco’s cozier and less fussy cousin. Maybe I’ll review the place later, in another post, but I bring it up now because it was on our first trip there that I was introduced to burrata cheese.
We’d ordered a few things off the menu, pasta for her, soup for me, selections of house made charcuterie, and then shared a sandwich as a main. We’d nearly tipped towards a braised short-rib sandwich that walked by, until we saw a heavenly looking six-inch stack of olive-oil drizzled kale stuffed into a bun. I’d been swapping in kale for spinach and other greens for a long time, but I’d never considered a sandwich of nearly nothing but. What they did here, I’m guessing, is blanch quickly, and then assemble mixed with a good olive oil and pasted anchovies, and between the thick layers was also a generous slather of the creamiest, sweetest cheese ever: burrata.
Promptly declaring this my favorite sandwich ever, the elusive cheese has since haunted me. When redoing the sandwich at home I’ve come close with ricotta, but never quite to the same consistency.
All that to say, this weekend at the market we found burrata.
It looks very much like a ball of fresh ball of mozzarella but it’s really soft to the touch. I hesitate to say breast, but will say “water balloon” and you can think what you want. When you cut into it, there’s a thin outer rind and then an inside like a gooey ricotta.
All culinary plans aside, what we ended up spending the afternoon doing was taking two of our massive, ripe, awesome market tomatoes and assembling a simple salad. Take the tomatoes and cut them crosswise into four or five sections. Make sure your knife is sharp so you don’t bruise the skin. Trim off the woody bit from the bottom so that it stands better, because you’ll be reassembling shortly, and trim out the stem section from the top of the thing.
Start from the bottom and on each layer add some burrata, sea salt, a glug of good olive oil, and some fresh basil. Add the next level, repeat, and repeat till you’re done. I worked slowly, chitchatting, and making sure my Jenga tower didn’t tip. I didn’t use any vinegar, but you can if you’d like. We relied on just the freshness of the tomatoes and the olive oil and salt for bulk of the flavor.
One of the market finds was a jar of Joe Beef’s seasoned “country salt blend.” For about six bucks, it’s a nice little treat.
Each of our tomatoes were bigger than my fist to start and almost twice that reassembled with the cheese. We didn’t make it to the fish, not even to even to the beef. But we did stumble to bed for a good long nap.
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