gazpacho

So JoeHoya totally stole my Part II thunder.

With my extreme abundance of tomatoes over the weekend, I made two go-to tomato recipes simultaneously: tomato sauce and gazpacho. Of course it was an obvious way to turn almost rotting tomatoes into something edible, as Joe Hoya pointed out.

And he’s right. Gazpacho is uniformly delicious but not uniformly similar in ingredients. In fact, tomatoes aren’t even a constant in some recipes.

As I rummaged through the tomatoes I noticed that a good half were yellow and the rest were a mix of red, purple, orange and green. I reserved the yellow for the gazpacho while I used the other colors for my maroon colored sauce.

Yellow Gazpacho

Roughly chop about 3 pounds of yellow tomatoes, non-rotting parts only. Immersion blend the following: yellow tomatoes, peeled, de-seeded and sliced cucumber, chopped Hungarian Stuffing Peppers (carries a bit of heat, way more flavorful than a green bell pepper and they are in light in color to match the yellow tomatoes), oil, white wine vinegar, salt and white pepper.

Cracked black pepper, to me, is one of the most attractive finishes to a dish. But for some reason I became really interested in preserving the pale yellow color of the cold soup. Cue the white pepper.

For color, however, I sliced in half sugar baby tomatoes. At least that is what I think that variety of tomato is called: they are slightly larger than sun golds, have a red exterior with white zig zag lines on the skin.

Also for some texture there are a few croutons, half floating on the surface. I simply cubed left over bread, tossed it with kosher salt, freshly cracked pepper and oil and placed it in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes.