Basic Easy Summer Gazpacho

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I make some version of this easy cold soup every summer. It’s never exactly the same way twice but I’ve tried to provide a rough recipe below. For soups like this though, where you simply throw everything into a blender, I believe it is about tasting and adjusting as you go. Many gazpacho recipes will have you strain the soup through a sieve at the end to refine the texture, but for a casual weeknight meal at home, I find this totally unnecessary so I never strain my gazpacho.

It started off as a recipe that I photocopied out of a recipe magazine that my mom would subscribe to while I was in college. I still have a binder with recipes like that from when I was first learning to cook on my own but the gazpacho recipe is at this point so annotated with my own notes and modifications from years of experimenting upon it that it’s a completely different recipe.

For these photos, I added roses made of tomatoes, basil, pennywort, and edible flowers as garnishes. This obviously defeats the purpose of keeping everything as easy as possible, but I was also able to blend those tomato guts right into the soup so nothing went to waste. If you do want to make the tomato roses, you can check out my step-by-step tutorial in this post.

Awkwardly Vague instructions for Basic Easy Summer Gazpacho

Ingredients

8+ early girl tomatoes, halved
1/2–1 cup roasted red sweet peppers* or jarred bell peppers
1 Persian cucumber, peeled and cut into chunks
1 slice sourdough bread, soaked in cold water
2 cloves garlic
1/4 red onion, cut into chunks
2–3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
red wine vinegar, to taste (I like it vinegary)
salt or fish sauce, to taste

Ingredients for garnishing (optional)

finishing oil, such as extra virgin olive oil, Sichuan pepper oil, or chili oil
cracked black pepper
fresh herbs
cherry tomato pieces

Procedure

Combine all the soup ingredients in a blender, cover, and blend on the maximum setting until liquified.

Pour into 2 soup bowls. Garnish as desired and serve.

*Note: In the summer, I like to get whatever sweet red peppers I find at the farmers’ market and roast off a big batch of them. They work very nicely for this recipe, but you can also use the jarred red bell peppers to keep this as a simple no-cook recipe. If you do choose to roast your own peppers, toss them with some olive oil, spread them on a lined baking tray, and bake at 425°F for 20 minutes, flipping halfway. Remove the green tops but you can otherwise throw the whole peppers into the blender, including the seeds and skins.