Eating In: Grilled Gazpacho

By Kevin Grzyb in Food on Aug 19, 2005 6:30PM

‘You can’t grill soup, you rubes!’ you might say. We agree, but the sly culinary devils we be, we can grill all of the ingredients and then process them into the Spanish style tomato based soup know and loved world wide as gazpacho. Gazpacho is usually a soup made from a base of pureed or juiced tomatoes and chicken broth. Vegetarians will curse us that it doesn’t need the chicken broth, but we’re talking about the traditional preparation.

Taking our cue from one of our heroes of “the ‘cue” Steve Raichlen, who gave a recipe for grilled gazpacho in one of the myriad number of cooking magazines early this summer, which, while we knew it was waaaaay too early to bother, because you couldn’t get a decent tomato at that time, we stored away in the recipe idea box in our mind as we waited for the first batch of plump early girls to show up at the market and make into this smoky derivation of the classic summer soup. (That was one long ass sentence, but gramatically correct.) Anyway, we thought that we would give it a try, mainly because gazpacho is good and we like things that are good. So here is how we went about it:

First we took the tomatoes, Early Girl variety from the farmer’s market, about eight (large). Two stalks of leek, upper green & root end removed, then halved. One bunch of green onions. Three Meyer lemons (a gift from friends in California who have a Meyer lemon tree in their yard, we couldn’t be more jealous). One medium bunch of unadulterated celery, also from the farmer’s market. One Vidalia onion, cut into eighths. All of these were washed cut and tossed in a large bowl with olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. Then onto the grill in batches. First the tomatoes go on the hot fire just until the skin starts to blister and blacken. Then the onions leeks and lemons (we know, it’s weird, but it worked) and finally the celery and a pan with four cloves of fresh garlic separated, but still in the skin. Grill everything until it gets some nice char marks on all sides or surfaces and start to soften. You don’t need to cook things through and watch the tomatoes as they will start to split their skins.

Next everything can be left to cool and then into the blender.

The only part of the gazpacho we didn’t grill were the cucumbers, because we only had two and figured that they would be better as a non-grilled balance of clean fresh flavor in comparison to the charred flavor of all the other components. Cut them (two medium or one large) in half lengthwise and remove seeds with a spoon. Then dice them up and put them in with the other bits in the blender or toss them into the serving bowl and ladle the soup over to add textural complexity.

We also took the leftover olive oil that was in the bottom of the original bowl from the pre grilling and added fresh herbs from the garden; thyme, parsley, rosemary, oregano and a little basil along with the garlic cloves, which browned over the grill and shook loose the skins. This mix went into the blender last.

Finally bowl it up and garnish. We used some raw sweet Vidalia onion and aromatic basil leaves. We also served this the next night with leftover polenta from another dish (we left it loose and wet, not solid and sliceable, but that might work too if you chopped it into small cubes). The chicken stock used to cook the polenta added that extra richness to the soup.

Enjoy.