Erica De Mane

Recipe in text below: Gazpacho with Cantaloupe and Basil

I don’t like bell peppers in my gazpacho, either green or red. They add a sharp gasoliny flavor so dominating, I find, that I can’t taste much else. Roasting would probably improve the pepper presence, but to my mind the point of gazpacho is to blend uncooked ingredients, releasing their essence and their trapped water while keeping it all as cold as can be so it’ll refresh your body on a hot day. No cooking here at all. But those bell peppers bummed me out every time. I wanted to love this soup so badly. You know what I did? I left the bell peppers out. Dramatic, I know. I instead emphasized the sweet by adding melon, balancing that out with sherry wine vinegar, a mildly bitter extra-virgin olive oil, basil, and sea salt.

If you’d like to try my version, you’ll need four medium summer tomatoes, chopped (I didn’t peel mine, but you certainly can if you want), a medium cucumber, skinned and chopped (I skinned it because I didn’t want the dark green skin to add a murky color), about 3 cups of cubed really fragrant summer cantaloupe, 2 chopped scallions (just the white part; save the green stems for the garnish), a piece of a fresh red chili (I used half of a red jalapeño from my garden), a small, very fresh summer garlic clove, chopped, and the leaves from  a few sprigs of lemon thyme.

Put everything in a food processor, and pulse it until blended but still maintaining a little texture (you don’t want it to resemble a smoothie). Add about a teaspoon of sherry wine vinegar (depending on its strength, you may need more; I used Viagre de Jerez Reserva, which is potent), some nice sea salt (I find that this soup can take a good amount of salt), and about ¼ cup of your best olive oil (I had on hand a Sicilian brand called Olio Verde that I really like that is bitter but not aggressively so). Pulse again a few times to blend. Depending on how much water is in your vegetables, the soup at this point may be thick or thin, but we’ll adjust that later.

Pour the soup into a pitcher or a bowl, and refrigerate it for at least 3 hours (overnight is fine). This will give it time not only to chill but also for all the flavors to blend.

When that’s done, it will have thickened a little. If it started out thin, this will be a good thing. In my case I  needed to loosen it up with about ¾ cup of cold water. My preference is for gazpacho to have body and texture but still be pourable. I don’t want a spoon to stand up in it. Next taste the soup, adjusting with more salt, vinegar, and/or hot chili if needed. Add about 5 or 6 leaves of well chopped basil, and stick the soup back in the refrigerator for about another hour to further meld the flavors and chill. Then it will be ready to serve. You’ll have four good-size servings.

I like garnishing each bowl with a fine chop  of cantaloupe, cucumber, the green ends of scallion, and a thread of fresh olive oil. And I love this soup with good bread, a plate of  Serrano ham, and a cold glass of rosato.