The Hirshon Gazpacho

Citizens, I am inordinately find of gazpacho, aka “liquid salad”. It may also be one of the very few vegetable dishes of any form I actually look forward to eating!

Ideally, one should only make gazpacho in August – you want to partake when vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes are available. These are the “weird looking” tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes, since they haven’t been genetically modified to be shelf-stable or uniformly round/red – all done at the expense of flavor. Only with these old-time tomatoes will you taste gazpacho at the true peak of palatal perfection! 🙂

Fuhgeddabouddit (that’s forget about it to non-New Yorkers) if you have to use the cottony, gas-ripened hothouse mutant tomatoes available during the rest of the year.

I literally ran upstairs to type this recipe into the blog after I made it up – I didn’t want to forget how I made this ❗ After a week-long, 100 degree+ heat wave, gazpacho seemed like just the ticket to cool off – and the farmers market had a beautiful range of heirlooms on display.

And yes, this recipe does call for bread – the true Spanish Gazpacho always uses bread, even if we what we eat here in the States doesn’t. I make no genuine claim to authenticity with this recipe – it is nothing more (or less) than my personal preferred way to enjoy this delicious taste of Summer’s bounty. 🙂 I roast a bit of onion and garlic as well as adding a roasted pepper to deepen the flavor. A few dashes of chipotle Tabasco completes the flavor profile to smoky perfection (for my palate, anyway).

Gazpacho. It’s spicy, it’s cold, it’s delicious. Try it for yourself, Citizens!

Battle on – The Generalissimo

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