Everything Can Be Gazpacho With the Right Attitude
We have officially reached Peak Summer Produce, which means we are all in desperate need of a fresh perspective on mountains of squash and fast-decaying tomatoes. This is why I think everyone should know how to make a good gazpacho. It’s a delicious, no-heat way to destroy tons of food, and you don’t even need a recipe – just a few pantry items, some sort of blender, and a little faith.
Most people think of gazpacho as a super-smooth, almost creamy, cold tomato soup or a bunch of diced vegetables floating in a V8. Today we’re going to focus on the former, because it’s almost impossible to screw up. Apart from vegetables, all you need to make the perfect gazpacho are starch, acid, and certain types of fats. When mixed, these three ingredients form a smooth, stable emulsion, which is the difference between a creamy bowl of gazpacho and a frothy, watery, oddly fibrous vegetable smoothie.
Traditional Andalusian gazpacho uses crispy white bread, aged sherry vinegar and olive oil, and while you can’t go wrong with either, these are just recommendations. Literally anything that looks like bread will work – leftover hamburger buns , gluten-free sandwich bread, stale cookies or bagels, old cornbread, English muffins, corn tortillas, Ritz crackers, and more – just like any acid or fat. complementing the flavor of your vegetables. For vegetables, anything you eat raw is the best choice for sheer laziness reasons, but you can also use more starchy or more fibrous ingredients if you cook them partially first. (For example, charred eggplant would be exceptional.) Puree everything but fat with a little water and a lot of salt until smooth, then gradually add fat to create a nice smooth emulsion. That’s all.
I was in the mood for a nice green gazpacho, so for this batch I used about four cups of chopped vegetables: one medium courgette, a large pitted cucumber, two celery ribs, lots of green onions, a tiny clove of garlic, and a handful of cilantro, dill, and mint each. My starch, acid and fat were about a cup of diced focaccia and a quarter cup of lemon juice and really good olive oil. The ratio I used – four parts vegetables, one part bread, and a quarter of each fat and acid – creates a nicely thick mashed potatoes that can be spoon-drunk, but you can adjust the proportions depending on what you have. This is the method of forgiveness.
Once I managed to convince my blender to pulverize a bunch of vegetables and old bread, I poured all the olive oil right on top and gradually added it to the rest of the mixture, as if I was doing it with a batch of mayonnaise in a blender . After resting in the fridge for mixing flavors overnight, I have the most deliciously refreshing summer meal I could wish for – and it’s ready when I am.
It doesn’t take long to prepare the formula, and once you’ve tried it, don’t be surprised if everything in your fridge starts to look like gazpacho food. My next move is a version that mostly uses corn – obviously with homemade cornbread as the starch – but I’m also considering adding some fruit: watermelon, cucumber and mint gazpacho topped with feta sounds pretty fantastic to me. There’s really no wrong way to make or eat a refreshing chilled soup, especially when it’s so hot outside.