Gazpacho andaluz recipe, Andalusia's cold tomato soup

Gazpacho andaluz is Andalusia's cold tomato soup, blended raw and served ice-cold — the technical point is that nothing here is cooked, so the vegetables' own water, sugar and pectin have to carry the whole dish.

The soup has roots in Roman-era bread-and-oil pastes, but the red, tomato version most people know today is a 19th-century farmhouse fix for a glut of ripe vegetables. Chef José Andrés still serves his wife Patricia's family version at home and calls it, in his own newsletter, his most famous dish — proof gazpacho earns its place on technique, not decoration. Mid-September is the last real window for sun-ripened field tomatoes before the crop turns to glasshouse fruit, and this recipe exists to use them at their sweetest.

Ingredients

Nothing here is cooked: raw tomatoes, oil and vinegar, forced into one cold emulsion.

• 1 kg ripe tomatoes, quartered
• 1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
• 200 g cucumber, peeled and chopped
• 1 small garlic clove, peeled
• 60 ml Spanish extra virgin olive oil, plus more to finish
• 25 ml sherry vinegar
• 1 tsp fine sea salt
• 100 ml ice-cold water, to adjust
• Diced cucumber, diced pepper and croutons, to serve

Method

1. Blend the tomatoes, pepper, cucumber and garlic on high for 1-2 minutes until fully liquid. Raw vegetables need real force to break down, since nothing here is cooked to soften the cell walls first.
2. Add the oil, vinegar and salt, then blend hard for 30 seconds more. Adding the oil last and blending at speed pulls it into the soup as an emulsion instead of a floating layer.
3. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve, pressing the pulp with a ladle. Straining out skins and seeds is what turns a rough purée into gazpacho's silky, drinkable texture.
4. Taste, adjust salt and vinegar, and thin with the ice water until the soup coats a spoon but still pours freely. Tomatoes vary in water content, so the finish is always checked by eye.
5. Cover and chill at least 2 hours, ideally overnight. Gazpacho is only gazpacho when properly cold, and the rest also mellows the raw garlic.
6. Stir well before serving, since the emulsion loosens in the fridge, then pour into chilled bowls with a drizzle of oil and the diced garnishes.

Keeping it, and serving it

Gazpacho keeps, covered, up to three days in the fridge, and the flavor rounds out by day two. Serve it as a starter with crusty bread for mopping, or in small glasses as a stand-up bite before dinner — either way, it wants to arrive properly cold.

The oil is a third of this ingredient list, not a garnish, so it is worth using a decent Spanish extra virgin olive oil rather than a neutral one.