Gazpacho
Milkshakes aside, gazpacho seemed to be the food most frequently recommended to me this summer, but only today did I finally make it. Here in the Northeast, we’re having a wretched summer tomato-wise and this was the first week at the farmer’s market I could find a decent selection (and at a price). This was also the first week that actually felt somewhat normal and busy. I underwent the procedure to have the arch bars removed and after that, did things like talk on the phone and plan my upcoming work schedule and order food in a restaurant and continue to make daily misjudgments of what my jaw can handle while I regain the ability to open wide, then close and chew properly. Looking ahead, this week looks to be the first of the summer that will be genuinely hot, with temperatures upward of 90F.
For all these reasons, gazpacho was the perfect thing to save for the very end. When made with fresh ingredients, this soup is at its finest in puree form, and it’s good at various stages of puree. I know I would have loved the flavor when consumed as a complete liquid, but it’s also great when blended in chunky, uneven batches left with some of the texture of bread and tomatoes.
Variations on the Spanish original have proliferated wildly; now there are recipes with all sorts of twists to make gazpacho spicy or sweet or fruity or a particular color or a Bloody Mary having an identity crisis. I’m not exactly a purist, but I’m also not convinced that any cold soup with tomatoes in it deserves to be called gazpacho. And I get that, if you’re trying to make your version marketable or you crave gazpacho out of season, it could be useful to make it with a set of alternative ingredients (again, consider the possibility that the soup you’re making isn’t actually gazpacho). But at the height of fresh summer vegetable abundance, traditional gazpacho ain’t broke and it don’t need fixin’:
- 3 field tomatoes, chopped (I used two yellow and one red)
- 1 decent sized onion, chopped, divided into two portions
- 1/2 large green bell pepper, chopped
- 1 cucumber, peeled and chopped
- 4 cloves of garlic, minced
- olive oil
- good crusty bread, cut into large pieces and toasted (I used about a third of a baguette)
- a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
- 1 1/2 cups “Garden Patch” (a vegetable juice sold at Trader Joe’s) or tomato juice
- salt to taste
Only as I prepared to dump everything in the blender did it dawn on me that this might be too much raw onion and garlic for my taste. If you love those things raw, then this is a no-cook recipe (except for toasting the bread): put everything in the blender and pulse until blended. Also, in this case, you could leave out the olive oil, except that it tastes great and if you’re wired shut, you need the fat. So nevermind.
In my case, the olive oil went toward sauteeing the garlic and about half the onion (after spooning it, piece by piece, out of the bowl with all the other vegetables; I don’t recommend repeating this step), just to soften it up and take the edge off. Then I dumped the garlic and onion in the blender, followed by the toast, then the vegetables and liquids in batches, pulsing it down to a puree with texture but no visible chunks.
About the liquid:
1. To blend to straw appropriate consistency, you should add additional juice as needed.
2. Most gazpacho recipes have a tomato juice base, which would have been my first choice, but I used this product called “Garden Patch” because it was already in my fridge. I bought it while wandering the aisles of Trader Joe’s in despair, thinking it would help me get enough vegetables while wired and forgetting I’ve never enjoyed V8 or anything like it. Although it made for a horrific michelada mixer (we all make mistakes), Garden Patch does fine in gazpacho and sneaks in a bit of extra Vitamin A and potassium. It’s pretty high sodium, as are many tomato juices, so factor that in to how salty you want your soup to be.
