This dish of olives, marinated along with cubes of fresh pecorino cheese, allows you to add another element to your entertaining spread with minimal effort. I’ve had marinated olives many times, but the addition of cheese is a relatively new discovery. After seeing it for the first time in a Spanish restaurant, I knew I had to find a way to bring it into my repertoire. We serve this at Chi Spacca, the meat-centric restaurant in the Mozza group, to go with the cured meats.
I selected the olives that I suggest in this recipe for their variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, from tiny black Niçoise to big green Castelvetrano. Use whatever you want and whatever you can find. I’m all for driving around to three stores in three separate neighborhoods (or towns, if I’m in Italy) if that’s to make a dish that I’m determined to make, but this is one that you should be able to knock out at one store. Fresh pecorino, also called cacio di Roma, is a young sheep’s milk cheese from Rome. It’s soft, like the texture of Jack cheese. It has a mild flavor, not to be confused with that of pecorino Romano, which is a very pungent, hard, grating cheese, and not what you want here. If you can’t find fresh pecorino, use fresh provolone or quality Jack cheese.
You can serve these olives on a buffet table along with the main meal, or as a starter to almost any meal.
Excerpted from MOZZA AT HOME by Nancy Silverton with Carolyn Carreño. Copyright © 2016 by Random House. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. —Food52
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