A tomato-less gazpacho for enjoying outdoors.
Where cucumber plays the balancing role between some of my favourite summer flavours.
This month here on ingredient we’re focusing on cucumber, the cool, refreshing vegetable that is just perfect for bringing a little relief to sweltering July days.
You can already find the recipe for my favourite Smashed Cucumber Salad (plus a handy method for pickling homemade sushi ginger) here. Paid subscribers will be getting another cucumber-focused recipe later in the month. Upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive!
I’ve been struggling to settle to almost everything recently. Perhaps it is because a big project I’ve been excited about for a very long time is still proving very slow to get off the ground, or perhaps it is simply that I’ve been feeling some of the greater sense of ennui that has been pervading the country this summer to the extent I’ve even up even reading the newspaper each morning as it never fails to bring me joy.
So far nothing other people seem discontent about at the moment has really touched me; I’d not got around to unfurling the hosepipe for the year so I don’t actually mind filling up my can and pottering around every evening to keep the vegetables well watered during what looks like to be a summer-long hosepipe ban (which is entirely the water companies fault, I might add), I’m lucky enough that I have such a grocery budget set by we can swallow the spiralling cost of groceries, and thus far the seemingly endless industrial action has not dampened my plans as it did last summer (but speak to me again once I’ve made it out of Heathrow and back during peak holiday time..!) I know I’m exceptionally lucky, but I feel how I feel.
Working outside on the patio when the weather allows (when it is not too hot or too wet, thanks Britain!) helps, as does eating out here.
Which brings me onto the matter of cucumber quite nicely.
I know some people can’t hold by cold soups, but the perfect one is revelatory. Last year on a sweltering evening I made the Chilled Cucumber Soup with Fried Courgettes and Spiced Almonds (pg 111) from Marianna Leivaditaki’s unparalleled Greek island cookbook Aegean: Recipes from the Mountains to the Sea, which helped cement it as one of my all time favourite cookbooks. Honestly, it was the best thing I made all summer and it turned me into a firm cold soup convert.
For my gazpacho today - a vibrantly orange, mood-lifting bowl which invigorated me out of my torpor for at least a good few hours - the cucumber is essential. Yes I’ve got the classic red pepper, and because I’ve got a lot of it in the fridge at the moment watermelon (yes, there are watermelon recipes incoming!) provides that extra refreshing note in place of the tomatoes that are still to turn from green on my vines. This is not a watermelon flavoured gazpacho - it is a note you’d miss if you removed it but which you probably won’t be able to put your finger on - but more a pepper one. Usually I’m not big on raw pepper, but here, it’s perfect.
But it is the two whole cucumbers chucked into the blender which makes it gloriously light and refreshing; the watery nature of the watermelon is too sweet, the pepper too punchy to add more than one to the mix. The cucumber is what marries the two into exactly what I want for lunch on a hot day.
Gazpacho is the perfect expression of a cucumber, without actually tasting of cucumber.
Make a jugful, and slurp it through the next heatwave (even if the weather forecast can’t seem to decide if it is that or thunderstorms that are brewing over the next few weeks!)
Watermelon and Cucumber Gazpacho
Serves: 4, Preparation time: 10 minutes, plus chilling time
I like to blend this gazpacho first thing in the morning so it has time to chill in the fridge by lunchtime. A high powered blender is key to a good smooth texture, but mine is only big enough to hold a portion at a time; I tend to blend in batches, mixing everything together at the end in a big bowl or jug. However, don’t be tempted to stir in the extra virgin olive oil after blitzing; it needs blender time to lend the gazpacho a velvety texture.