Gazpacho

I have to confess that a good French onion soup is hands down my favorite soup. I love the gooey melted cheese and the mushy soaked bread, especially if the beef broth is properly prepared and actually flavorful. But French onion soup is a very special treat, one that I savor maybe once or twice a year. Gazpacho, however, is a soup that I can enjoy on a daily basis because it is both delicious and healthy.

What is Gazpacho?

Gazpacho is a cold raw vegetable soup that originated in the province of Andalusia, in the south of Spain. Although its traditional main ingredients are tomato, cucumber and garlic, a quick Google search pops up with recipes that contain all sorts of additional ingredients ranging from jalapeno and Worcestershire sauce to zucchini and celery. It seems like everyone has his or her own gazpacho recipe! And I’m no different. I actually have two.

The Time Life Good Cooks Series Recipe

In late January 2015, I was planning to do a Spanish theme when I hosted the Old Comrades for dinner at the house. I decided on several different tapas as appetizers and a giant paella as the main course, but I was at a loss as to what to do for the soup/salad course. I talked with one of the creative geniuses, who immediately suggested a gazpacho and generously offered to loan me the Soup book from his 1980s Time Life Good Cooks series. Of course, there was a tried and true gazpacho recipe within its pages!

Over the course of the next eighteen months, I fiddled with the recipe a little to streamline the steps and to make it work with my less-than-powerful household blender. The recipe starts out with processing six cloves of garlic, bread cubes, and white wine vinegar into a paste. I usually get lazy and substitute two tablespoons of minced garlic from a jar (one teaspoon equals one clove, and three teaspoons equals one tablespoon). I also often substitute plain distilled white vinegar for the white wine vinegar because that is what I have on hand. The vinegar is always too little liquid for my blender to process those ingredients into a paste, so I have to jump ahead in the recipe steps and pour in a can of V8 vegetable juice for everything to process smoothly. Then I can go back to the second step and add three medium sized tomatoes and half of a cucumber. Once all that is perfectly pureed, I pour it into the plastic pitcher that fits in my refrigerator and stir in one diced medium tomato, one diced green bell pepper, and one half diced cucumber. Sometimes I leave out the green bell pepper, and just add the diced tomato and cucumber. Because there are no seasonings specified in the recipe, this version of gazpacho often needs to have a little salt and ground black pepper added to each bowl.

This recipe is very light and refreshing. Despite the addition of the canned V8 juice, the soup tastes like raw vegetables, in a good way. Dicing the vegetables to add at the end is extra work, but the texture that they add to the soup is definitely worth it. I just made a batch two days ago and it isn’t going to last much longer!

The Vegetable Butcher Recipe

About one year later, in February 2016, NetGalley approved me for an advance reader copy of The Vegetable Butcher by Cara Mangini. The goal of this book was to educate its readers on how to select, clean, and prepare a wide variety of common and uncommon vegetables. The primary attraction of the book to me was the introductory informational page for each vegetable, which gave basic information about its seasonal availability, complementary flavors, varieties, storage, and selection.

Naturally, when I found the Seaside Gazpacho recipe in the Tomato chapter of The Vegetable Butcher, I had to try it. Especially since it was the dead of winter and gazpacho seems like sunshine in a bowl! My first attempt was a comedy of errors because the publisher didn’t quite understand that six medium tomatoes didn’t fit in a standard household blender – and I tried to make them fit. Huge mess is an understatement. But over the next eight months, I adapted and perfected my technique with this gazpacho recipe as well. Again, to accommodate the quirkiness of my blender, I have to add the olive oil with the tomatoes, cucumber, and garlic paste, which is completely out of order according to the original recipe. The original recipe may have also required blanching, peeling, and seeding the tomatoes, as well as peeling and seeding the cucumbers; however, I dispense with all that fussiness and tolerate flecks of green cucumber skin in my red soup. Once the vegetables are pureed, I add in the bread and salt, and puree that as well. I think the original recipe wanted the crusts removed from the bread, but, again, that is too fussy for me so I skip it. Most of the times, I follow the recipe and let the mixture stand for 15 minutes for the bread to soak before proceeding, but I usually have to pour some of the mixture out of the blender into my plastic pitcher in order to create enough space in the blender for the next round of ingredients. After the bread has soaked, I add one red bell pepper, half a red onion, sherry vinegar, and ground black pepper to the blender for one final puree. Then I add that mixture to the plastic pitcher and stir well to combine the two batches.

This recipe tastes like something different all together. It could be because it has olive oil and salt built into it. Whatever the reason, the batch I made two weeks ago was gone in two days – it was that good.

The Verdict

At their core, the two recipes are extremely similar in that they require pureeing tomatoes and cucumber with bread, garlic, and vinegar. The Time Life Good Cooks recipe adds one can of V8 and diced vegetables, while The Vegetable Butcher recipe adds olive oil, red onion, red bell pepper, salt, and black pepper. The Time Life Good Cooks recipe takes a little more effort because it requires dicing vegetables, but that takes about the same amount of time as it does to wait for bread to soak in The Vegetable Butcher recipe. In the end, which recipe you choose depends on whether you are in the mood for a fresh and crunchy raw vegetable taste, or for a smooth and silky cream-like taste.