Reply 20 of 27, by bristlehog
- Rank
- Oldbie
My favourite dish I can brew myself is Gazpacho (which is basically a cold tomato soup).
Ingredients:
(The numbers are roughly for 4-5 persons amount)
some 100g of cottage cheese
1.5 kg of tomatoes
one middle-sized cucumber
one big red sweet pepper
one slice of garlic
two loafs of wheat bread
250g of strained tomatoes (I use either Pomi or Giaguaro, don't have any other around)
3 teaspoons of sugar
1.5 teaspoons of salt
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1.5 tablespoons of olive oil (if got none, sunflower oil will do instead)
0.5 tablespoons of lemon juice
Tabasco sauce, like 30 drops, but use your taste
Equipment needed:
Big bowl
Big saucepan
A blender like this:
A steel colander:
A pounder:
The process:
First, you take your big saucepan and boil the water there. In the meantime, wash your vegetables. Do a x-slice on the top of each tomato.
When the water boils, turn the stove off and put all the tomatoes into the saucepan so that hot water covers them whole. Wait 2 minutes and pour the water away. Now pour in cold water. You need to take out every tomato and peel its skin away.
After peeling the skin, slice each tomato into 4 parts (or even 8 if tomatoes are very big), cut off the penducle. Put tomato slices in the bowl.
Now get your red sweet pepper, slice it, cut out the seed basket, and slice the remaining into pieces. Put into the bowl. Then take the cucumber, peel the skin away and slice the remaining into bits, then put into the bowl. Now take your garlic, take the husk away, cut the remaining in two and squash each half with a flat side of a knife. Throw into the bowl.
Now the bowl contains sliced tomatoes, cucumber, sweet pepper and garlic. Get the blender and blend everything.
Now take your bread loafs and cut the crust away. Cut the remaining into bits and put into the bowl. Wait some 5 minutes for them to soak, then blend again.
Now you need to put the mass through the colander with your pounder or what you got. It is required to get rid of tomato seeds, pepper peel and other rough stuff. When you squash the mass through the colander, it becomes much more tender.
Now it's time to add the spice. Put in the squashed tomatoes (Pomi or Giaguaro or whatever), it adds the darker color and deeper taste. Add the sugar, salt, red wine vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice and Tabasco sauce. Mix everything. Add the Tabasco sauce progressively until the poignancy satisfies you. Now cover it and put into the fridge for 3-4 hours to let it infuse.
It is served cold (that's why I only cook this during summer). Stir well before serving as it tends to fractionize when let alone for a long time. Put a bit of cottage cheese (just a teaspoon is usually enough) into each dish, it adds well to the taste of Gazpacho.
This is how it looked today before the troglodyte attack:
Ready to be served:
Served:
Despite the seemingly long and complicated process, this dish is a no-brainer and takes about a hour to do (not for the first time of course). It is also tasty as hell, otherwise a person as lazy as me wouldn't spend the time to learn and regularly execute this recipe.
Here you can get fantastic wallpapers created by a friend of mine: patreon.com/Unpocodrillo