For our tomato gazpacho, there are several different types of gazpacho. This one is an Andaluz gazpacho from Spain. And it’s more of a smoother gazpacho than the Mexican version which is more of a chopped gazpacho.
Okay, so we start off with tomatoes, nice beautiful red bell pepper, cucumber. And again, this is also a very, very easy soup because you’re going take and again you’re going to peel the cucumber. As you can see, I don’t like to use a peeler that much so I go straight with a knife. So, we peel the outside and the reason that you take the green off of the cucumber is one has a little bitterness to it. And secondly, you don’t want that in your soup at the final stage. Okay, so we take this off. The green will also bring in a color to the soup that you don’t want. And the final product, you want it to be a nice red soup. And so we take a little bit of this off. Once we take that off, we go ahead and cut the cucumber in half. It is simple. And then we seed the cucumber, okay. So, we take our spoon again, brush right down, it automatically have the seeds taken out of the cucumber. And so, we do that with all of our cucumbers here.
Now, this is also a great soup to serve at a dinner party. If you don’t want to serve it during the day time, you can serve at a dinner party. You can do it with lobster. You can do it with shrimp. I’m going to be doing it today with a little bit of crab today. Okay, so we cut our cucumber up. I’m going to add that to our bowl. This is going to be our marinading bowl today. We’re going to take our tomatoes. We’re also going to cut them. We’re going to remove the end. We don’t want any of the stems also in the soup. You don’t have to take the seeds out of the soup but you do have to take the end of the stem off the soup. And so we cut our tomatoes up. Then we’re just going to take and chop the tomatoes up. It’s not that important that the tomatoes have to be perfect as you’re chopping them up because this process we’re using is going to be a macerating process. And you can let this sit overnight in the refrigerator as well. Then we’re going to take a little bit of bread, any kind of bread will do. I particularly like more of a french pota. So, we want to take the skin off of the bread. And the bread is going to be used as a thickening agent in the soup. So, once we have the skin off and again I’m going to slice down, cut it into little pieces. That’s about enough there.
So, now I have our bread, okay. Get some salt. Always very important, remember that you need to put salts in the beginning of the process. Now, we’re going to have some basil. So, we take some of the leaves of the basil off. It’s over here. And make sure you always clean as you go. It’s always a very important asset of a cook. You always want to make sure that you’re always nice and clean. We’re going to cut some of our basil up. Put that in there. Then we’re going to put a little bit of fresh olive oil inside. Now, this soup requires a little bit of olive oil. Put a little bit of sherry vinegar inside. The sherry vinegar is going to add a nice balance between the tomato. And then we’re going to put our last ingredient which is our bell pepper.
Whenever you make a gazpacho, very important that the flavors, they all have to be roughly the same in the soup so you don’t want them to be overpowering it with too much bell pepper, overpowering it with too much cucumber. And the basic recipe is two parts tomato to one part cucumber and one part bell pepper because it originally is a tomato based soup. You want to have some of that nice tomato flavor in there. So, what I’m doing here is I’m removing the white part of the bell pepper because the white part is very, very bitter just like any type of pith of a fruit. This is going to be extremely bitter so you want to remove that. We’ll cut this one. And as you can see there, we left a little white on there so you want to make sure to remove that as well. So, remove that, okay. And then again, we go ahead and we cut up our bell pepper and we get it ready for maceration. All right, wonderful! Now, you’re just going to move it around a little bit. You smash it up just a little bit. It helps get the flavors going inside as we move that around, all right. Looks good, okay.
Now, once that’s done, then you can set that aside. Oh, I forgot the garlic. You can’t forget the garlic. In this recipe, you can go ahead and just take you’re knife, put your garlic on your board and give it a smash, okay. Put that in there like that. And again, you don’t have to worry about what it looks like now because when you put it in the blender, it’s going to come out nice and smooth. So, we mix that together. Our board is nice and clean. Now, we’re going to start the process of the garnish.
Okay, so what I have here, it’s almost like a dough, it’s a very thin dough as you can see that, okay. This is a rice paper, okay. And it’s called Feuilles de Brick and this is a wonderful, wonderful thing to do with—you can put really anything inside Feuilles de Brick. And what it’s going to do since it’s a rice paper, is when you put it in the fryer, it’s going to fry up nice and crisp because the rice is acting as a crisping agents as well. Okay, so we take our paper all right. A little bit of the crab meat. Okay, we start by cutting just a little bit of the paper at the end dough then we’re going to take our crab meat. And we are going to put just a little bit inside. Make a nice even line there, okay. And then you start just rolling the crab meat up. You want to pull the paper back, make sure not to cut the rest of the paper because you need to use that to stabilize it when you’re doing the rolling process. So, you want to make that nice and tight, okay and roll it like that. And you just continue rolling, okay. So, you think that you have the right size. Then it’s just a matter of cutting it at the end, okay. This one, you can reserve for another one, okay. And that’s it there alright.
Now, we’re going to go ahead and fry that up. Let’s check our oil and make sure our oil is ready. Okay, oil looks good. So, we basically just drop that in there like that. It takes roughly 45 seconds to a minute and a half to cook. We have one ready to go. Okay, you want to make sure that after you roll it to put it in the freezer because then it stays nice and tight and neat, okay. Now, we’re going to put it on our fryer. Okay, not just yet. Oil is not just ready yet. This is what the finished product looks like. So, as you can see, it gets nice and beautiful brown on the outsides. It has a nice crunchy texture to it. Okay, I don’t know if you guys can hear that out there. It was in a nice and crunchy texture. And for this dish, we’re going to serve it inside of a little small martini glass. So, once your tomatoes and your cucumbers and your bell peppers and everything have been marinating for a full day, then you’re going to go ahead and you’re going to put it into a blender, okay. So, in this process you blend it up. And once it’s blended, you’re going to get a nice refined soup like this, okay. Pour some of the gazpacho inside okay. Now, this is a very, very nice soup. I love this soup because again it has a little bit of a sweetness of the tomato, has a sweetness of the bell pepper and you are also doing a nice little garnish of the crab on the side so it adds a little sophistication to the dish.
Okay, so after it’s cooked, we’re going to go ahead and cut the outsides off okay. So, it’ll give it a nice look. Put that on your plates. Put this there. And if you’d like to do a little bit of herb garnish on top. Okay, we’ll use a little bit of basil because basil is in our soup already. Okay, put a touch of basil on there and then you’re going to put just a little bit of olive oil on top, okay. And what that olive oil does is, it adds a nice look to the soup plus it adds a very nice fruity flavor to the soup at the end. Tomato gazpacho with a crab stick!
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