In honor of Cinco de Mayo and the warmer weather, I decided to make one of my favorite summer dishes: gazpacho. I have a little bit of an obsession with soup; its is one of my all time favorite foods and honestly I think I could eat it every day for the rest of my life. It’s so easy to make, and there’s something about it that’s just incredibly comforting – there’s nothing like a warm bowl of soup on a cold or rainy day, and there’s nothing like a cold bowl of soup on a warm spring day! And with the weather finally warming up here in New York, I figured gazpacho, a cold tomato soup, would be the perfect fresh, easy, and healthy weeknight dinner.
Being Italian and Jewish, I don’t really have childhood memories or cultural relationships to gazpacho. But every summer my dad grows a huge – and I mean huge – tomato garden at our house upstate. While figuring out what to do with our seemingly endless bounty is pretty easy in the beginning, by the end of the summer we end up with a huge surplus of tomatoes. Pretty tomato-ed out at that point in the season, with no new ideas on what to make, one year my dad decided to just throw all of our leftover tomatoes into a blender with a few fresh herbs and some olive oil, in hopes of freezing this tomato pulp to make fresh meals all winter long. But with one taste we realized this blended tomato concoction was delicious enough to just eat straight from the bowl with a spoon! And while I don’t think we recognized it at the time, somewhere along the way we realized that there was a name for what we thought we had stumbled upon all by ourselves: gazpacho! Since then, gazpacho has become a staple meal for late summer afternoons when we simply have more tomatoes than we know what to do with, or even when we’re just craving this simple and tasty cold soup!
While my tomato garden hasn’t even been planted yet, the 80-degree weather here in New York had me craving this summer staple. So instead I bought my tomatoes from the supper market – certainly not as good as picking them fresh off the vine in my own backyard – but if you choose tomatoes on the vine or a smaller variety of tomato, such as cherry or plum, you still get that ultra sweet and concentrated tomato flavor. Along with cool refreshing cucumber, sweet bell pepper, and the bite from jalapeño and red onion, you’ll have all the layers of flavor you expect from a long simmered soup in the time it takes to zip all the ingredients in the blender.
There are a thousand gazpacho recipes out there, but mine calls for a few specific things. A bunch of avocados and mangoes sitting on my counter going ripe far too quickly inspired me to make a mango avocado salsa, with jalapeño, red onion, and tons of cilantro. The fatty avocado and spicy jalapeño balance perfectly with the sweet mango and tomatoes – just try your best not to eat all the salsa while you are waiting for your gazpacho to chill like I did! Now with this incredible salsa to put on top came the question of how to make the gazpacho itself. A lot of gazpacho recipes call for tomato juice to thin them out; I think tomato juice tends to take away from the freshness of the ingredients, and if you are using really ripe tomatoes you will get enough liquid from these alone, so I usually skip this ingredient all together. I like to make my gazpacho in two batches – I throw half of my ingredients into the food processor or blender and totally pulverize them until there are no chunks left, just a thick and creamy liquid – this is the base for my soup. Then I throw the other half of my ingredients in and just pulse them for a few seconds, keeping them in slightly larger pieces to still retain the crunch of each veggie. Traditional gazpacho uses stale bread as a thickener; I used corn tortilla chips instead, partially because that was what I had on hand, but they also add a great texture and salty taste to the gazpacho. When you’re done blending your gazpacho, you can decide if you want to add some more thickener, or even a touch of water or tomato juice to thin it out, based on the texture you want. That’s part of the beauty of this soup; like a fingerprint, no two tomatoes or peppers or cucumbers will ever be the same, so every time you make gazpacho you’ll have to do a little playing with the texture to get it exactly how you like it. And who doesn’t love playing with their food?!
- For the Avocado Mango Salsa:
- 1 ripe avocado, cubed
- 1 ripe mango, cubed
- ½ cup cilantro, minced
- 2 tablespoons lime juice
- ½ jalapeño, more or less to taste, finely minced
- ¼ red onion, about ¼ cup, finely minced
- Salt and pepper
- For the Gazpacho:
- 2 lbs sweet, ripe tomatoes
- 1 large cucumber, seeded
- 1 red bell pepper
- 2 tablespoons lime juice
- ½ jalapeño, more or less to taste
- 1 small clove of garlic
- ½ red onion
- ¼ cup apple cider or white vinegar
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 cup tortilla chips or stale bread cubes, more or less depending on the texture you would like
- Splash of tomato juice or water, if needed
- Salt and pepper
- Cilantro for garnish
- Roughly chop tomatoes, cucumber, bell pepper, red onion, jalapeño, and garlic. Add garlic and jalapeño to food processor or blender and blend until complete pulverized. Add half your chopped veggies, olive oil, lime juice, vinegar, liberal salt and pepper, and a few tortilla chips, and blend on high until a thick liquid forms. Depending on how thick you would like your gazpacho, add more tortilla chips to make it thicker or a splash of tomato juice or water to make it thinner. Add the other half of your veggies and pulse or blend a few quick times, just to roughly chop them. Taste, and add more salt and pepper as needed. Allow gazpacho to chill at least one hour before serving. The longer it chills, the better it starts to taste.
- To make the mango-avocado salsa: combine all ingredients and serve a dollop on top of the gazpacho, or with chips to dip!
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