My Favorite Summer Recipe: Cold Gazpacho Soup!

Here is a link to the written recipe:

https://JPWrecipes.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, the Wizard of Weird, and I welcome you to Joshua P. Warren Daily. This show is raw and unedited, so you may or may not hear some strong language. I am going to tell you on this edition of the show about my favorite summer recipe cold gazpacho soup. And I'm telling you this because I just pretty much can't find it in any of the stores or restaurants. I mean, I live here in Las Vegas. I'm recording this in the middle of summer. It was 115 degrees Fahrenheit today. And it's the time for cold Spanish gazpacho soup. And I did find one restaurant that sold a gazpacho, but it was and it was good, but not quite what I'm used to. Now look, uh, if you want to hear the whole story about this soup and and what it means to me and how I make it, keep listening. But I understand a lot of you don't have time for all that shit. And so I have created a new website. It's called JPWrecipes.com. Those are my initials, Joshua P. Warren. JPWrecipes, it's plural.com. And from time to time I'm going to start uh occasionally giving you some of my favorite recipes here at Joshua P. Warren Daily. Um, it'll just be kind of random, weird stuff. Maybe you should just only listen to it if you're bored, behind the scenes kind of content. But if you just want to cut to the chase, go to jpwrecipes.com and you'll find the actual recipe there along with the picture of it. But otherwise, uh, I hope you'll also um take the time to sort of listen to the story of why I like this and and what this dish is. Uh, this uh this platform, this podcast called Joshua P. Warren Daily has been around for a long time. It's been kind of off and on, but I'm about to start doing more and more regular episodes of this, all raw and unedited without any commercials. And so if you don't already subscribe, whatever platform you're using, I hope that you will go ahead and subscribe right now because I have some pretty crazy things coming up soon that I will only be sharing through this format, Joshua P. Warren Daily. Now, gazpacho is a cold Spanish vegetable soup, perfect for hot weather. And, you know, as with most recipes, there are there are many variations. I'm going to tell you about my favorite that I have perfected, and I'll tell you how I came across this. I lived for years in Puerto Rico, and in old San Juan, Puerto Rico, there is this cathedral that's the second oldest cathedral in the entire Western Hemisphere. And across the street is this place which used to be a convent, and it's now called the Hotel El Convento. And it's one of the most luxurious places to stay in Old San Juan. And I'm looking at the Wikipedia page right now. It says uh Hotel El Convento is the oldest member of the historic hotels of America. It was also named the premier small luxury hotel in Puerto Rico by the small luxury hotels of the world organization. Now, I used to spend a lot of time in old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I would always make a point to drop by the bar at the old Hotel El Convento because I wanted to have their gazpacho. And basically you'd sit down and I would always order, you know, like a cold Latin beer, and then they would bring out this glass bowl, and it had this mixture of all of these uh cold vegetables as well as some croutons, and it was just it was the perfect refreshing little dish on a hot, humid, tropical Caribbean day. And I got so used to it that when I moved from Puerto Rico, I quickly found like I can't find gazpacho like this anymore. I started looking into exactly what it is supposed to be officially, gazpacho, and that's spelled, as you know, G-A-Z-P-A-C-H-O, a cold, uncooked vegetable soup, some stale bread and olive oil originating from the Andalusia region of Spam, uh made of fresh, raw vegetables, liquids, and seasoning, uh perhaps a thickener. And the name gazpacho, they say it's uh the origin is uncertain, but uh one of the main theories is it goes back to the Latin or Greek roots, meaning a collection of various fragments. So when I moved here to Las Vegas and it was so hot, I thought, man, I'd love to have some of that you know throwback to the old Caribbean gazpacho, and it just wasn't out there. And uh I even started emailing food critics and food experts uh all over Las Vegas, and they're like, no, no, nobody makes gazpacho. And like I say, I finally found one place recently, a Tapas place, that makes it, but it's not the kind of gazpacho that I'm used to. And so I started perfecting the home recipe for the type of gazpacho that I had in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but I think it may even be better because I've had time to play with it. It's inexpensive to make, it's simple to make, you just have to follow these very basic steps. So here we go. Here is the recipe for Joshua P. Warren's gazpacho, a cold Spanish vegetable soup perfect for hot weather. The only real tool that you you need is a blender. And you could do this without a blender if you really wanted to get all manual and mash things up, but you know, a blender is gonna that's gonna get you where you want to be. Uh okay, so here are the ingredients. Uh for one thing, I also think that this should be served in a glass bowl or at least a porcelain bowl. I wouldn't serve it in plastic. I maybe it's just I I think it I I think that when you have it in glass or porcelain, it kind of like holds the temperature a little better and it's just maybe it's uh placebo, but I I think it tastes better. So here's what you do. And don't overthink this, alright? You get your ingredients together. You get one and a half pounds of just fresh red tomatoes, and usually that's about three or four tomatoes. Uh obviously, you want to wash everything well and chop up your tomatoes into cubes. Again, don't get too specific about sizes here because it's all going into a blender. Next, you want one big long English cucumber. Now, you could use a non-English cucumber, but I don't know. It just seems like the English cucumber has a little bit of a strange zing to it. So you want to peel that whole cucumber and chop it up into little discs, basically. Then get yourself one red bell pepper. Obviously, you want to cut it open, clean out the seeds, and then chop that thing up into little cubes. Next, get yourself one clove of garlic. Now, listen, don't do more than one clove. I've tried before, and it's still good if you use more than one clove, but it can be a little too spicy and strange. So stick with one clove, don't overdo it. Take that clove, skin it, chop it up a little bit. Then you need two tablespoons of red wine vinegar or sherry vinegar. And then you want to have just a little extra virgin olive oil that you're going to use here and there to swirl around. Um, your last ingredients will be just typical table salt, typical table, black pepper, and then you want to get yourself some fresh croutons. Now, yes, you can make your own croutons if you really want to get serious, but I just buy like off-the-shelf croutons and they work just fine. The last thing that you need that adds just that last little oomph and also a bit of decoration and color is just some thinly sliced basil leaves. You can buy a little pack uh at the grocery store of um of whole basil leaves, and then you want to just cut them up into little thin pieces, almost like tinsel. So that's all you need. And I would repeat that, but again, all you have to do is go to jpwrecipes.com and it's written down there for you. So here's what you do you take all this stuff, you you combine the tomatoes and the cucumbers and the red pepper slices and the garlic and the vinegar and just a little bit of oil in a blender, and then you blend it or puree it, you know, you have different settings or different blenders. Some people like their gazpacho to be like liquid, I prefer it to be a little chunky. So I stop it when it starts to get like barely chunky. At that point, you can taste it, and at that time you you can determine how much extra salt or black pepper or vinegar you need. Because that's that's the time to put in salt and pepper and vinegar and really kind of put on the finishing touches. Um, and you know, that you also, if you want to play it safe, you can just not add the salt and black pepper and let the person who gets the serving add his or her own salt and black pepper. But you know, it's a it's a matter of uh how specific you want to get in terms of uh each person's taste. But once you taste it, once it's kind of chunky, and you decide to add in your last minute salt and black pepper and more vinegar if needed, well then you quickly hit it with that blender again. No more than like four seconds. And then you should be done. You cover this and refrigerate it until it's chilled. Now, I like to chill it at least for six hours, but you could probably get by with less, like four hours, frankly. But still, whatever. Just make sure it's nice and chilled. And then it's time to serve it. Take your your bowl, um divide, pour the soup in, it'll come out like a kind of a slushy pinkish-orange looking thing. Uh pour it into the bowl. Once it's in the bowl, take out your extra virgin olive oil, and just swirl a little olive oil on the top, and then take like four or five or six of these little slices, these thinly sliced, fresh basil leaves, and just kind of put them down in a nice little pattern around the bowl, almost like spokes on a wheel. And then to top it off, put down four fresh, crunchy croutons, three or four fresh, crunchy croutons in a nice pattern right in the middle. And you'll see the picture there at jpwrecipes.com to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, and then you're done. Then it is time to enjoy the cold Spanish vegetable soup, perfect for hot weather, the gazpacho. And in my opinion, this is the perfect gazpacho. This is the way it it should be done, but don't get all, you know, retentive about the whole thing. Play with it, experiment it, uh, experiment with it, and find what works for you. All right, my friends, I will be sharing more recipes in the near future on this podcast, just as a random fun thing, because it's kind of like uh playing around in chemistry lab, right? That's what fun cooking should be about. And I'm always gonna try to tell you about recipes for things that um are hard to just purchase because I'm big on getting food delivery. But if I can't get easy food delivery or buy easily at the grocery store and I've got to make it myself, I'm like, okay, well, that's something if I get it right, I can share it with other people. So I'll be sharing more recipes with you soon. Again, please be sure to subscribe to this podcast. Call joshua pwarrendaly.com, and that recipe is posted for you right now at jpwrecipes.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.