Recipe Tips for a Summer Menu

Summer menu. Summer, a season that is synonymous with freshness and lightness, even in the kitchen. And we need lightness more than ever, especially after the last year.

Summer menu

The restaurants need it, which have finally been able to reopen in the evening too (for now only with the possibility of sitting outside), which are experimenting with new ways of enjoying the table, creating sophisticated dishes but always with an eye to tradition, which in Italy is anything but routine given the delicacies that the menus of each region offer.

The competition becomes high, not so much due to the birth of new establishments eager to acquire their own clientele, but rather due to people's desire to enjoy quick and light dinners without having to prepare and consume them at home, so the aim of the owners of the commercial establishments is to amaze diners by combining the classic flavors of the season with more exotic ones. Here is a complete list of tasty summer recipes to suggest to customers, from appetizers to desserts, to encourage them to come to your restaurant.

A good start...suggestions for a tasty appetizer

For a summer menu

The ideas for summer dinner that we will show you feature aubergines as the protagonists, a vegetable widely used during the season, even Tessa Gelisio appreciates them, host of cooked and eaten, who often includes them in his dishes. Thanks to its ability to absorb food fats well, aubergines are the first choice when you want to offer rich and tasty dishes, such as aubergines and anchovies cream, excellent for spreading on a slice of bread before starting dinner, even better on hot croutons.

To prepare it, you must wash and cut the aubergines in half lengthwise, then soak them in water and vinegar.

After ten minutes you need to drain and sprinkle them with coarse salt, then wrap them in foil to bake them at 200°C. In the hour needed to cook them, it is necessary to chop the garlic and anchovies very finely. Then take the aubergine pulp with a spoon and place it in a bowl, adding salt to taste.

Once you have combined the garlic and anchovies with it, sprinkle a generous amount of pepper, oil and vinegar. Then you need to mix with a fork to obtain a homogeneous mixture. Finally, decorate with mint leaves.

First course: the heart of the summer menu

Continuing our journey in light summer recipes, we have chosen a dish that recalls the colors of Italy: basil and aubergine ravioli with cherry tomatoes and burrata. The creation of the dough for the ravioli involves the action of blanching the basil leaves in salted water, which will be drained and blended with oil and egg yolk.

To then be kneaded. The filling is made by cooking part of the aubergines in the oven at 180°C with salt, oil, garlic and thyme, until the pulp is tender enough to remove with a teaspoon. The other half must be peeled and cut into cubes so that it can be browned with a clove of garlic, oil and thyme in a pan. Finally mix it with the pulp obtained previously, completing everything with grated parmesan.

The ravioli must be cooked in boiling water first, and then in a pan with oil and a little cooking water. A cherry tomato sauce should be prepared separately. These should be left to cook for a couple of minutes with garlic and olive oil, adding a little chopped basil at the end of the browning. The dish must be finished with the freshly basted sauce and the burrata, served at room temperature. We recommend garnishing the dish with a basil leaf. It is a simple but certainly impactful first course.

Dessert: a way to end a summer menu in style

Finally, to satisfy the desire for holidays in exotic places, you can serve a coconut cylinder with mango jelly.The base of this dessert includes a soft coconut biscuit.

Made by creaming butter and sugar together, to which coconut flour, rum, corn starch and eggs are then added. Everything must be cooked in the oven at 180°C for 6 minutes. The top layer that will be placed on top of the biscuit is a mousse, which involves boiling coconut milk with rapé coconut, a kind of coconut flour but made into larger flakes, which will then be left to rest for about ten minutes, and then draining the entire mixture with the help of a sieve.

The white chocolate cut into pieces and the isinglass will be added to the mixture and, after another ten minutes, the whipped cream. Closing the top of the cylinder is mango jelly, obtained by boiling the mango puree with sugar and agar-agar, a vegetable gelling agent, which must be poured onto the mousse and left to cool in the fridge for two hours. A dish cannot be considered complete without a finish: we therefore advise you to decorate it with rapé coconut, mango cubes and sauce, so as to create continuity with the other ingredients that make up the dessert.

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