Dish Articles

Cooking with Capers

Story by Catherine Bell

The caper bush yields two kinds of ingredient: capers are the flower bud of the caper bush, so must be gathered before the bush flowers with its distinctive beautiful, white clematis-like blossoms.

Once flowering takes place and the plant fruits, another delicacy forms: the caperberry – a seed filled pod on a long stalk.

When the buds are picked they are immediately sorted by size, then pickled in brine or packed into salt. Preserved in this way they develop a deep, intense flavour and will keep for years if need be for use in many traditional dishes of the Mediterranean. Sometimes they develop small white spots on the outside, but this is simply due to an enzyme reaction and does not affect the caper. Caperberries are also pickled.

Capers come in a range of sizes and can be as small as a baby green pea (4-5 mm) or as large as a small olive. The French prize the tiny ones, which they call ‘nonpareil’ – after the tiny sugar balls used to garnish cakes.

Before using capers, those in brine should be drained and rinsed, while the salted variety require soaking in several changes of water for about 20 minutes to remove as much salt as possible. They can then be dried on paper towels and used whole or chopped. Dried well and fried in oil they open out like a little flower and make a crisp and attractive garnish.

Capers are one of the main ingredients in a classic tartare sauce, which the British love with their battered fish. The French incorporate them into the raw beef dish of steak tartare and serve them in browned butter over skate wings. They are also integral to olive tapenade.

The Italians have even more uses for capers: in salsa verde served traditionally with bollito misto in caponata, in a lemon and olive oil sauce for fish, as a flavour ingredient in tomato-based pasta sauces such as pasta alla puttanesca, and as a garnish for vitello tonnato (poached veal with tuna sauce).

In Spain their love of pickled vegetables sees caperberries on tapas menus where they are served whole with their stalk still on, or sliced or chopped in salads. Capers are seen less in Spanish cooking than in Italy or France, except in simple sauces made with olive oil and fresh herbs like parsley, or in a green mayonnaise (not unlike tartare sauce), which is served with fried fish.

Capers go with:
Anchovies, aubergine, basil, beef, capsicums, chicken, lamb, lemon, mayonnaise, olives, parsley, potatoes salmon, tomatoes, tuna, white fish.

Photo by Manja Wachsmuth

Story by Catherine Bell