Eduard recently came home from a conference that was held in Italy. Sorrento, to be more precise. He couldn’t stop talking about the food that was served out during the conference. He was especially enthusiastic about the mozzarella that he got offered wrapped in lemon leafs. He was so enthusiastic that he decided make this at home and surprise me with this starter.

As a pay-it-forward, I’m going to share this super easy recipe with you here. I now finally understand why he was so over the moon about this. I really hope you will try it out at home, as I’m pretty sure you won’t be disappointed by it. You might even decide to buy a lemon tree, just for the leafs, not even for the fruit!

The perks of growing our own food is that we have unusual ingredients available to us, ingredients that one would otherwise have to search for at equally unusual places. You see, this dish is very simple, but requires good ingredients. One of which is pretty commonly available in most stores: buffalo mozzarella. The other one is slightly more difficult to find: lemon leafs. Ideally non-sprayed ones. As we happen to grow our own lemons, we also have lemon leafs!

Ideally you want to keep the mozzarella in one piece as you prepare it and wrap some big lemon leafs around it. We didn’t have (healthy) big leafs on our little tree, so Eduard decided to cut the mozzarella and wrap the smaller leafs around the bite sized pieces. This worked out perfectly as well.

INGREDIENTS
  • buffalo mozzarella
  • enough leafs to wrap around the mozzarella

HOW TO

Preheat the oven at 160C. Wrap the washed lemon leafs tightly around your mozzarella and make it stick with some tooth sticks. Place them in an oven dish and then in the oven. Take them out when the mozzarella starts to melt slightly. It will take about 20 minutes to happen. Serve hot as a starter. Optionally drizzle some olive oil or some greenery on top, but it isn’t really necessary for the taste.
By the way, we don’t eat the lemon leafs.