Gazpacho

Name: Gazpacho: Cold Spanish Tomato Soup Recipe
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 30 min
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Ripe tomatoes 3-4; Young green cucumbers 3-4; Green onion 1; Lemon 1; Hot pepper 1-2; Garlic 2-3 cloves; Olive oil 2-3 tbsp; Water (frozen into ice cubes) 1 cup (200 ml); Parsley 4-5 sprigs; Salt, black pepper to taste

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30 mins

Spanish gazpacho is the classic cooling dish for the hot season. Plenty of fresh tomatoes, vegetables and herbs is a good way to cool down in the summer heat. On top of that, this chilled soup takes very little time to make. And you don’t have to follow the recipe to the letter: the soup should be your own and a bit special.

There are plenty of cold soups in world cuisine that need no cooking: okroshka or beet soup, tarator in Bulgaria, a cold yogurt-based soup, cacik in Turkey, cold borscht or holodnik with beets in Belarus, and so on. Not far from Valencia, in the municipality of Buñol, the La Tomatina festival takes place on the last Wednesday of August, in plain words, a tomato fight. And the whole town starts to look like gazpacho.

The base of the soup is raw ripe tomatoes pureed until smooth, plus chopped vegetables. Nobody knows for sure where the word gazpacho comes from. One theory ties it to a word for “leftovers”, meaning “whatever is in the fridge”, like Soviet-style pizza. Many also think the term comes from a Hebrew word meaning “cut up” or “chopped”. Either way, it reflects the essence of the soup: chopped ingredients.

Authentic recipes, most of them from peasant cooking, include white bread crumb or stale bread. Most likely, this cooling soup was the only dish of the meal for simple people, so adding bread made it more filling and more caloric. But times have changed, and the soup’s popularity has gone far beyond the circle of the poor.

An iced soup is not cooked at all, salmorejo for example. It is essentially a thoroughly chilled tomato puree with spices and ice, poured over chopped vegetables: cucumbers, onion, garlic and herbs. Lemon juice is always added, sometimes balsamic vinegar, plus parsley. If you like, the cold soup can be hot or spicy. And the color of the soup does not matter at all: it can be anything from pale to blood red.

10 ingredientsTo the recipe

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Ingredients

2 servings

Ripe tomatoes 3-4
Young green cucumbers 3-4
Green onion 1
Lemon 1
Hot pepper 1-2
Garlic 2-3 cloves
Olive oil 2-3 tbsp
Water (frozen into ice cubes) 1 cup
(200 ml)
Parsley 4-5 sprigs
Salt, black pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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Let me say right away that gazpacho with bread crumb did not appeal to me. It reminds me of tyurya, a bread soup. Adding croutons, as in pea soup, did not impress me either. So I make this dish only from fresh vegetables. For the soup, pick the ripest and juiciest tomatoes, preferably with small seed sacs. The color and shade of the tomatoes are not that important. In Spain itself the soup is often colored with plant-based colorants, red pepper for example.
Choose small, very young green cucumbers, preferably straight from the garden, parsley and, if you like, hot pepper pods. Properly cleaned hot pepper will not make the soup burning; it adds aroma to the overall flavor. Put the cucumbers and herbs in cold water so they stay crisp. And perhaps most importantly, prepare edible ice in advance: pour a glass of clean water into ice cube trays and freeze it.
Put the ripe tomatoes in a large bowl and pour boiling water from a kettle over them for 1-2 mins. Then cool them with cold water. Peel off the outer skin, which looks like a film. Cut the tomatoes in half and remove the seeds, the white parts and the stem end. Put the tomato pieces in a chopper.
If you don’t like hot pepper, or are simply afraid of it, take a small red sweet pepper. But hot pepper is better. Remove the seeds and the white inner membranes from the hot pepper pods. Cut the pepper into pieces. Peel a few cloves of garlic. Add the garlic and pepper to the chopper. Add a pinch of salt, some pepper, 1-2 tbsp of fresh lemon juice and 1-2 tbsp of olive oil. Blend the tomatoes until pureed. There should be no solid bits in the tomato puree. To be sure, you can rub the puree through a sieve or a mesh colander.
Young green cucumbers don’t need peeling. Cut off the ends of the cucumbers and slice them lengthwise into four. Dice the cucumbers and put them in the bowl in which the soup will be mixed. Chop the green onion tops quite finely into the cucumbers. Add half of the prepared ice cubes.
Mix the chopped cucumbers with the tomato puree. As you stir, the ice cubes start to melt and blend into the tomato. Then put the soup in the fridge to chill thoroughly. Chilling can take 1 hour or more. In the end the soup should be icy.
In the middle of a very hot day, ladle the iced gazpacho into bowls and sprinkle with coarsely chopped fresh parsley leaves, or just add a sprig of parsley.
Before serving, add a few ice cubes to the cold soup and, if you like, season with extra black pepper.
Iced gazpacho quenches thirst and cools you down in the heat. And, surprisingly, the cooling effect lasts a long time.