A classic gazpacho is a bread soup. Bread and garlic, in fact, are the only ingredients a tomato- based gazpacho has in common with its Moorish ancestor, the gazpacho blanco, a cold soup made with almond milk, grapes, garlic and bread. The bread in gazpacho serves two functions: It acts as a thickener, and it smooths out the sharp and raw flavors in the dish, a role bread often plays in Mediterranean cuisine.
Most gazpacho recipes call for stale bread or bread that has been soaked in water. I don’t like the porridgelike consistency this gives to the soup, so I add coarse toasted bread crumbs instead, and garnish the soup with extra bread crumbs at the last minute to give it a nice bit of crunchiness. I like to use fresh Roma tomatoes, slow-roasted to soften their texture and concentrate their often watery flavor. Many recipes call for whole tomatoes to be blended or mixed in a food processor, which lends the gazpacho an unappetizing pale pink color. Worse, blending the seeds and skins gives the soup an acrid flavor.
The ideal instrument to give the soup base a fairly smooth consistency and a deep red color without having a bitter flavor is a food mill outfitted with a medium disc. The food mill passes the tomato pulp while keeping the seeds and skins out.
A Spanish gazpacho gets it sharpness from raw garlic, sherry vinegar and onions. An American- style gazpacho (such as the recipe to the left) usually contains some of these ingredients as well as some form of hot pepper — such as jalapeño — or hot sauce. The resulting dish owes as much to Mexican cuisine as it does to the Spanish prototype.
If you find the flavor of the classic gazpacho too raw, you can mellow it with reduced shrimp or lobster stock, and garnish the chilled soup with pieces of shrimp, lobster or crab.
John Broening cooks at Duo Restaurant, .
Gazpacho
Serves 6-8
Ingredients
3/4 cup olive oil
18 Roma tomatoes
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 slices sourdough bread
2 medium cucumbers
1 jalapeño pepper
2 red bell peppers
1/2 cup celery hearts
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 small yellow onion
3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1/2 cup cold water
Cilantro or basil for garnish
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush a baking sheet with 1 tablespoon of the oil. Cut the tomatoes in half. Season the cut side of the tomatoes with salt and pepper. Place the tomatoes cut side down on baking sheet. Bake until the skin easily peels away from tomatoes, about 20-30 minutes, depending on ripeness. Cool.
Dice the bread into medium- sized croutons. In a mixing bowl, toss the croutons with another tablespoon of the oil and bake on a baking sheet until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Cool. Roughly chop the croutons and set aside.
Pass the tomatoes through a food mill with medium disc into a large mixing bowl.
Peel and seed the cucumbers, discarding the ends. Roughly chop the cucumbers. Cut off the stem of the jalapeño and roughly chop the pepper. In a food processor, puree the cucumber along with the jalapeño. Add 3/4 of the cucumber mixture to the tomatoes and reserve the remaining mixture. Seed, stem and de-rib the bell peppers. Roughly chop the peppers and the celery and puree it them in the food processor and add to the tomato mixture
Mince the garlic by hand. Finely dice the onion by hand. Add the onion and garlic to the tomato mixture.
Add half the bread crumbs, the water, the remaining oil, sherry vinegar, and salt and pepper to the gazpacho. Chill for at least 1 hour. Taste again and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
Garnish with the cucumber mixture, basil and cilantro and bread crumbs. Pass the cucumber mixture and the bread crumbs at the table.
