Gazpacho!

So last week I had the great privilege to go to Spain with Atlantis Global to learn more about their medical shadowing program for pre-health students.  Short story is that it's awesome and I'll be taking a group of Guilford students to Teruel, Spain to do medical shadowing in the Spring 2020 3-week session.  While I was there, I ate some amazing food, including a couple of delicious bowls of gazpacho.  Which was especially delicious given that the temperature was pushing 100°+ while I was there:

Coming back, I was determined to make this silky smooth, deliciously cool soup.  Turning to the internet for recipes, I found that there are approximately Avogadro's Number of different possible ways to make this soup.  😳  Quickly abandoning the chunky versions (which I'm sure are great, but not what I wanted) as well as Kenji Lopez-Alt's version that required you to freeze all the vegetables and then some other stuff (I just got overwhelmed).  Even his "easy version" seemed too complicated, and also had 1 cup of olive oil in the ingredients!  Eventually I settled on the recipe from Bon Appetit, and I think it came out pretty well!

Ingredients:

Ingredients

½. English hothouse cucumber, peeled, seeded

½ large red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded

2 lb. very ripe red tomatoes, preferably heirloom, cut into ½" wedges, 3 Tbsp. seeds reserved

½ large shallot, chopped

1 garlic clove, finely grated

2 Tbsp. (or more) sherry or red wine vinegar

Flaky sea salt

3 tbsp. olive oil, plus more for drizzling

Method:

Step 1 Cut 2" of the cucumber into ¼" pieces and set aside for serving; coarsely chop remaining cucumber and place in a large bowl. Cut one quarter of the bell pepper into ¼" pieces and set aside for serving; coarsely chop remaining bell pepper and add to bowl with chopped cucumber. Add tomatoes to bowl and toss with shallot, garlic, 2 Tbsp. vinegar, and 1 Tbsp. salt. Let stand 30 minutes at room temperature to let flavors meld.

Step 2 Transfer tomato mixture along with any accumulated juices to a blender. Add 3 Tbsp. oil and purée on medium speed until smooth; season with salt and vinegar, if desired. Strain through a coarse-mesh sieve into a large bowl or pitcher and chill until cool, about 1 hour

With some pics!

First line up your ingredients (tomatoes and cucumbers from this weeks' CSA, including the gianormous Cherokee Purple on the far right that weighed in at 1.25 lbs)

Peeled seeded and chopped the cucumber, cored and chopped the tomatoes (no peeling!), chopped the red bell pepper and shallot and tossed them all in a bowl and grated in the garlic clove.  Season w/ salt and pepper and add sherry vinegar:

Stir it all up:

And let is sit for 30 minutes:

Put all that in a blender along w/ 3 tbs of olive oil and let it rip at "medium" (my blender doesn't have a medium setting so I picked the middle button which said "mix").  Then put the mixture through a coarse sieve into a bowl (this was kind of a pain, but worth it -gets rid of peels and leftover seeds- and you get about 4.5 cups of this:

Let it sit overnight in the fridge to chill, and it is delicious.  You're supposed to serve it w/ chopped tomato, cucumber and a drizzle of olive oil but I haven't gotten to that part yet.  One of our hosts from Atlantis Global, Alexandra said she loves gazpacho but never makes it because they sell it in the grocery store and it's delicious.  I wish we had that here, but for now I can use this as a way to deal with the onslaught of tomatoes and cucumbers that are coming!