Capers

A friend recently tasted their first salted caper. Biting down onto an unfamiliar, strong and distinct flavour, the culprit was immediately fished out for perplexed inspection. Thrusting their palm in front of me, they asked if I knew the identity of the tiny dark green knobble sitting there. A food lover that's familiar with pickled capers, I was a little surprised that they didn't. Then again, salted capers are utterly different from their pickled siblings - culinary chalk and cheese.

Salted got the thumbs up, so I sent a tub in the mail, which in turn opened the question of what they're best eaten with. This post is for them. Everything you could ever want to know about capers.

360 degrees on capers

Capers are the unopened flower buds from Capparis spinosa, a spiny bush native to the Mediterranean region that grows wild on walls and in rocky coastal areas throughout. The salted or pickled buds are a common ingredient in Mediterranean cuisine, especially Italian (Sicilian and southern in particular) and Cypriot. If the bud isn't picked, it flowers and produces a fruit, caperberries, which don't have as much flavour as the young buds. They are cured in vinegar and salt brine and eaten like olives.

Capers are classified and sold according to their size, with the smallest, the most intensely flavoured, being the most desirable:

• non-pareil (up to 7mm)
• surfines (7-8mm) 
• capucines (8-9mm)
• capotes (9-11mm)
• fines (11-13mm)
• grusas (14+mm).

Salted capers have more aromatic intensity than those cured in vinegar, but they can be very, very salty. To prepare, rinse well under plenty cold water and taste the final dish before adding salt.

Flavour affinities

Capers go extrememy well with the following foods:

• butter sauces
• eggs
• fish, particularly salmon, fresh mackerel, trout, tuna and any white fish pan fried in butter, not forgetting fish and chips with tartare sauce
• pasta
• pork
• potatoes
• rabbit
• rich meats e.g. lamb, steak, veal, patés, rillettes, tongue
• salads, all kinds
• tomatoes
• vinaigrettes. 

The Flavor Bible isn't tremendously inspiring on the subject. Aside from the above, the only entries that I may not have considered are almonds and celery. For herbs and seasonings it lists anchovies, basil, garlic, lemon, lime, marjoram, mustard, olives, onions, oregano, flat-leaf parsley, tarragon and vinegar. Reads very like the roll of ingredients for salsa verde!

Some of my own favourite caper combos

• Alongside paté or rillettes.
• With smoked salmon.
• In an egg sandwich - sliced boiled egg, a dab of aioli, handful of green leaves, cress or sprouts.
• As part of a gutsy pizza topping with anchovies, chilli and olives.
• Sprinkled through salads, especially:
  • raw, julienned beetroot with lots of freshly ground black pepper, maybe a few spinach leaves and a crumble of goats cheese
  • julienned carrot and courgette dressed with lemon juice and a fruity olive oil, serve with steamed white fish for a lovely and delicate summer supper
  • a simple, seasonal green salad dressed with a traditional vinaigrette (got to be made with red wine vinegar, plenty dijon mustard and a finely chopped shallot). Ooh, want that with a rare steak now.
• And, finally, they're absolutely delicious with any kind of carpaccio, e.g. beef, salmon, tuna. I've recently seen a venison one, as yet untried, but I bet they'd go wonderfully together, loud aromatics lifting the gamey pungency.

Now that I'm on the flavour trail, taste neurons firing randomly, it occurs to me that they'd go well with orange zest. A fennel, orange zest and caper salad? Sure that would be magical with a fat, grilled mackerel. With chicory hearts braised in butter. Grapefruit? They're good with rocket, am thinking grapefruit, rocket and almond salad... with a pretty little pink fillet of smoked trout... Mmm.

Caper classics

Caper sauce
Celeriac remoulade
Puttanesca sauce, traditionally served with spaghetti in the famous spaghetti alla puttanesca, literally "whore's spaghetti" (Wikipedia says it also goes well with penne, bucatini, linguine and vermicelli, who am I to argue)
Salsa verde - garlic, onion, anchovy, lemon, olive oil and herbs - packs a fantastic punch with fish or ladled over grilled vegetables
Sole meunière
Steak tartare
Tartare sauce, includes capers and cornichons, so many favourite things in one dish
Tapenade 
Veal dishes

The Silver Spoon 

Since capers are particularly common in Italian cuisine, it made sense to consult the nation's cookery bible, The Silver Spoon, Italy's most successful cookery book and one that many brides receive as a wedding gift. It lists 25 entries, notably: 

• brains with capers (bleugghh!)
• hard boiled eggs and ham in aspic (interesting, though not sure I want to try it)
• caper salad (dandelion leaves, curly lettuce, carrot, fennel, olive oil, red wine vinegar and basil)
• rabbit and vinegar
• salt cod with olives and capers
• skate with capers
• summer veal.

I'm nodding my head in vigorous approval to those last five, especially the caper salad and the rabbit and vinegar. Piquant and unusual.

 

BBC Good Food Online

Type 'capers' into the Good Food search facility and you get 130 hits. The following stood out for me:

Cherry tomato and caper spaghetti
Healthy fish and chips with tartare sauce, God that looks good
Gordon Ramsay's triple decker steak sandwich
Sole meunière
Crab on toast with caper and parsley mayo, mmm, also looks amazing
Cured beef with fennel salad, takes three days to cure the beef but looks worth the wait, must try this v soon!!
Steak tartare
Seared tuna with caper and red onion salsa, with oregano in there too, is making my mouth water, but who overcooked the steaks?!
Patate in agrodolce (Sicilian warm potato salad, literally 'sweet and sour')
Salsa verde
Poached egg on green beans with ravigote sauce 
Salmon rillettes
Fresh salmon carpaccio 
Smoked salmon on rye with caper soured cream, looks like a stonking sarni.

Time to get capering with capers!