Caprese panino with prosciutto crudo

The panino alla caprese is the Italian sandwich that somehow manages to taste like a two-week summer holiday on the island of Capri even when you are eating it on a rainy Tuesday in a grey office kitchen. The caprese (tomato, mozzarella, basil) is already a masterpiece of balance, and when you slap it inside a crusty ciabatta with a few slices of prosciutto crudo, it graduates from pleasant light meal to complete meal that leaves you thirty minutes of the lunch break left to nap in your chair.

We became religious about this sandwich the summer we worked as lifeguards at a small beach club on the Amalfi coast. We would come off the morning shift, walk up to the bakery behind the church, and order the exact same panino every day: mozzarella, tomato, prosciutto crudo, basil, a thin layer of something the baker called just il mio olio and refused to specify. We ate these at the edge of a concrete pier with our feet in the water and our sunglasses at an angle and had probably the most uncomplicated meals of our lives. The baker retired the year after we left, which we took slightly personally, and the one who took over used a different bread and a different oil and we never quite bought another sandwich there.

You can make this sandwich in your own kitchen in about five minutes, and it will never be as good as the one from that specific bakery, but it will still be very, very good. A few rules. Use mozzarella di bufala if you can afford it, or fior di latte if you can't, and drain it on paper towel for a few minutes so the sandwich doesn't get soggy. The ciabatta matters; a supermarket one is fine, but go for the kind with a crackly crust and an airy inside rather than the pale sad kind. Prosciutto crudo should be sliced so thin you can read a newspaper through it. And do not, under any circumstance, toast the bread. The caprese panino is a cold sandwich, and anyone who toasts it has misunderstood the assignment.