I learned to love gazpacho when working summers at the Warren Store in the Deli. Before that, the idea of cold soup was completely unknown to me. There we'd make gazpacho 5 gallons at a time, and it would go pretty quick. Our deli gazpacho was chunky, hand cut, and that's the way I tended to like it from that point on.
My family has different ideas. My wife will do chunky gazpacho, but my daughter straight vetoed it a couple of years ago. Which means stick blender to the rescue.
It also means that prep time is a lot less, because you can stick blend pretty big chunks. It also means, instead of using 4 cups of store tomato juice, I can dice up another 2 lbs of heirloom tomatoes, and it comes out so much better.
This is a modified Moosewood's Cookbook Gazpacho
- 3 lbs large ripe tomatoes, diced
- 1 cucumber, peeled and seeded
- 1 bell pepper, seeded
- 1/2 cup chopped onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 3 tablespoons of olive oil
- 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
- 1 tablespoon of honey
- Juice of 1/2 lemon
- Juice of 1 lime
- 1 teaspoon of salt
- 1/2 teaspoon of ground black pepper
- 1 teaspoon of dried basil
- 1 teaspoon of dried taragon
- 1/2 teaspoon of cumin
- chopped fresh parsley
Combine it all in a bowl then blend to mix. Chill for at least an hour.
The results:
This is using a lot of german striped tomatoes, so we're more in the orange direction tonight. Looking forward to having it for dinner!