Try something new with melons and make gazpacho. Photo courtesy Kyle Books.
May 2010 |
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Melon Gazpacho Recipe
A Refreshing Summer Treat
This recipe is from Chef José Pizarro’s Seasonal Spanish Food (read the review), a conversational-style cookbook that will teach you how to shop and prepare Spanish cuisine seasonally. We’re all familiar with the classic gazpacho
made with tomato and cucumber, but in Spain
the name covers lots of different chilled bread
soups, all of them delicious. In
Extremadura, for example, locals make a
version known as gazpacho extremeño or en
trozos, which means “in pieces”: the ingredients
are chopped up rather than blended in a
processor, resulting in a chunky rather than
smooth soup. All sorts of ingredients are used,
too. People make a partridge gazpacho; an herb
gazpacho, made with an intense-tasting plant
called poleo, which is a cross between mint and
thyme that grows everywhere in the heat-baked
countryside; and this, a particular favorite, made with melon. It’s a fabulously
refreshing soup, and isn’t so unusual when you
remember that tomatoes are fruit, too.
Recipe yields 4 servings.
Melon Gazpacho
Ingredients
- ½ small, mild white onion, finely diced
- 2 beefsteak tomatoes, seeded and diced
- 1 small melon, seeded and diced
- 1 large green bell pepper, seeded and diced
- 1 tablespoon superfine sugar
- 5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 3 tablespoons sherry vinegar
- 1 quart water
- 4 slices white bread, in chunks
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preparation
- Dice all fruits and vegetables.
- Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, cover, and chill for at least 4 hours
before serving.
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