An hour of salting before the pan goes on: the Neapolitan courgette dish most people ruin at the same step

One kilo of courgettes, two or three cloves of garlic, a good bunch of mint, eighty millilitres of white wine vinegar and oil for frying. That is all. The Neapolitan dish "zucchine alla scapece" contains not a single expensive ingredient, and yet most people ruin it - always at the same step.

An hour of waiting before the pan goes on

The courgettes are washed, dried, their ends cut off, and sliced unpeeled into thin rounds of about three to four millimetres. Then comes the step everyone skips: they go into a colander, get lightly salted and are left for about an hour. The salt draws the water out. When the hour is up, they are drained and dried thoroughly with kitchen paper, pressing gently.

Why is this compulsory? Because water and hot oil do not cooperate. A damp courgette does not fry - it steams, browns unevenly and spits. The same logic applies to frying in any kitchen anywhere: dryness is a condition, not a detail.

Frying in small batches

The oil should be plentiful and genuinely hot. The courgettes go into the pan in small batches - never piled up. Any overcrowding drops the oil temperature and the result is steaming instead of frying. They should be golden outside and soft inside. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and drain them on paper.

The layers and the vinegar

The mint is washed and dried, the leaves separated and the larger ones torn by hand. The garlic is peeled and cut into thin slices - thin, so it can be easily picked out later if you want a milder flavour. Then you layer: a layer of courgettes, slices of garlic and mint leaves between them, then again.

The vinegar is poured over evenly. The key is the measure - the courgettes should be well soaked but not submerged. Too much vinegar kills the delicacy of the courgette and leaves nothing but sourness.

Cover it and leave it at room temperature for at least two hours. If you are making it ahead, after those two hours it goes into the fridge - but comes out around thirty minutes before serving. Straight from the fridge, this dish loses its aroma and gains weight.

Neapolitans eat it as a starter, vegetarian and vegan without needing to advertise it as such. To us all of this sounds familiar - salting, draining, frying, dousing in vinegar - because it is the same logic behind pickling and behind the way our grandmothers prepared courgettes before putting them in jars. The difference is the mint, and the fact that here you do not wait for winter.