Gazpacho: summer in a bowl


by Chef Boy Ari

As a high school lad, long before I was Chef Boy Ari, I was the cook at a small Harvard Square Café called the Blacksmith House. It was humble work, hardly the glamorous world of behind-the-scenes restaurant madness described in the likes of Anthony Bourdain?s Kitchen Confidential. The biggest rush I ever got was when I noticed a band-aid missing from my thumb right after I?d just sent out 12 chef salads.

This was before the days of finger condoms, which you?ll now see adorning the digits of chefs who?ve gotten careless with their knives. Luckily, we found the band-aid via an emergency recall of a large serving tray en-route to a table of intellectuals.

What that job lacked in the adrenaline department, it made up for in wholesome flavor. Every morning I would make a different cold soup. The most popular, by far, was gazpacho, a tangy liquid spice with a myriad of earth-toned flavors. But like the food-snob I was yet to become, I thumbed my nose at the notion of serving gazpacho that hadn?t aged at least 24 hours. So I always made gazpacho the day before, rather than ?day of.? Nonetheless, the servers would sneak into the walk-in fridge and serve same-day gazpacho, explaining with a wink to their customers how they braved the threat of my angry cleaver to do so.

Almost all of my soups came from the Moosewood Cookbook, which sprang from the legendary restaurant of the same name in Ithaca, N.Y. At home, I?m usually not big on recipes, preferring to navigate the kitchen by gut instinct. But at the Blacksmith House, with five gallons of soup on the line, I wasn?t taking any chances. I got to know the Moosewood Cookbook very well, its nonglossy, handwritten pages stained by the many wonderful soups described therein.

Last week, while eating breakfast at a friend?s house, I noticed his tattered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook. When I picked it up, the pages opened right up to Fruit Soup on the left and Vichyssoise (potato leek soup) on the right ? two soups I used to make. Even though it?s been 17 years, and all the food stains were in different places, I knew that if I flipped back one page I would find gazpacho. I borrowed the book and brought it home to the lab, where I proceeded to recreate the gazpacho of my youth. There weren?t any waitresses to flirt with or band-aids to lose, and I wasn?t multiplying everything by 10, but most other things hadn?t changed a bit. Like, for example, the fact that making gazpacho somehow takes longer than you think it should, considering all you do is chop some stuff, put it in a bowl, and mix it. And as usual, I was tempted to stray from the printed path. But for old time?s sake, I stuck to the recipe with all of my might.

The recipe said 4 cups cold tomato juice and 2 cups diced tomatoes, but my tomatoes were so juicy that I just went with 6 cups of tomatoes. And rather than lose all of that juice on the cutting board, I used a blender. Ditto for the diced, medium-sized cucumber, which I poured into the bowl of tomato puree. To that I added 1 minced onion, 1 tsp honey, a dash of cumin, a dash of hot sauce, 2 T olive oil, the juice of half a lemon and one lime, 2 T wine vinegar, a minced green pepper, and two chopped scallions.

I couldn?t bear to use only one clove crushed garlic, so I substituted an undisclosed but significantly higher amount of vitamin G-spot. The recipe called for 1 tsp each of dried basil and tarragon, but I had fresh basil, and tarragon from a jar of pickled peppers, so I used them instead ? exceeding 1 tsp each, because it was fresh.

While chopping ¼ cup parsley, a very curious thing happened. The smell of the parsley combined with the smell of the rest of the gazpacho in my nose, before I had actually mixed it together, and wow. There it was again, the smell of gazpacho happening in front of me. Just then, a sunflower petal fluttered to the cutting board, having hitched a ride from the garden where I got the parsley.

It?s exciting when you finally mix it all together. But the choir of kazoo-blowing angels doesn?t instantly leap from the bowl. The complex flavor needs time to come together, making it rather difficult to add salt and pepper to taste. So my advice is to go light in this department, tasting often over the next day or so, adjusting the final seasoning as the gazpacho evolves. Back in the day, this gave me ample opportunity to linger in the walk-in fridge, sampling from the vats of cake frosting. ?

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