Recipes Discovered

Gazpacho Recipe

At a recent “Taste of” event in town, I had a bowl of what I would call cold soup. It was very thick broth with olive oil and pepper on top. I didn’t really know what it was, but it tasted great. A couple days later I caught the end of a Food Network show that had a very similar looking bowl of soup. After doing a little investigating, I found out it was called Gazpacho.

Gazpacho really is cold soup, popular in Spain and Portugal during the summer. While there are many varieties, the basis of the soup is tomato and bell pepper. It can be served either pureed (like I had it) or chunky. The recipe I found said that while fresh tomatoes should be the base, canned tomatoes are okay if you can find good ones. The author recommended Hunt’s Petite Diced tomatoes, which is what I used. The recipe is for chunky style Gazpacho, so only a little bit of the tomatoes are pureed and the rest of the ingredients are just diced. Since the soup I had originally was pureed, I decided to reverse the directions and puree everything except about a half cup of tomatoes. Plus it’s much easier to put everything in the blender than it is to dice it. >>

The ingredients are canned tomatoes, a seedless cucumber (also known as an English cucumber), a yellow bell pepper, onion, garlic, parsley, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. I didn’t add the jalapeno, and also used rice wine vinegar instead of sherry vinegar. Anyway, I roughly chopped all the ingredients and put them in the blender with a little bit of water and blended until smooth. It took a couple minutes to get a nice consistency. I served it in individual bowls, topped with a bit of the reserved tomato and extra pepper.

The soup was just as good as I remembered. I have no idea where the flavor comes from and I can’t really describe it. It’s a very fresh and delicious taste. I had leftovers the next day, and the flavor just got more intense so you could definitely make this soup ahead of time. It would be really great in the summertime too, with fresh tomatoes. Plus since it’s a cold soup, it doesn’t heat up the kitchen.