Gazpacho

GazpachoI’m looking out of the window as I type this, and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it’s definitely not summer any more. This will be this 2010’s final recipe for the contents of your greenhouse. This year hasn’t been fantastic for tomatoes, but the cucumbers have been glorious (full disclosure here – I didn’t grow any myself, but my parents have enough to club a small army to death with), and peppers are at their best now. It goes without saying that this recipe is totally dependent on the quality of your ingredients.

Most think of gazpacho as a cold tomato soup. Tomatoes do make up the dominant ingredient by weight, but a good gazpacho should take much of its flavour from the cucumber (surprisingly aromatic) and peppers. Get the finest, ripest vegetables you can find, and if at all possible, try to get your hands on one of those lovely, spurred, English cucumbers  – they’ve a lot more flavour to them than one of the smooth-skinned supermarket variety. Use your best olive oil, and enjoy the last of the sunshine. If you’re preparing this as part of a special meal, you can jazz it up something spectacular by shredding some fresh, sweet white crab meat, and putting a couple of tablespoons of it in the bottom of each bowl before you pour the soup over.

Finally, a word of warning. Your guests might have a baked-in dislike of chilled soups. Check before you serve this up. I remember the look of utter misery on my Dad’s face when we visited a friend’s house once and were presented with a choice of Vichyssoise and gazpacho to open a meal with. Dad, you’re a heathen, but for you I’d warm this through on the hob.

To serve four as a starter, you’ll need:

1kg ripe tomatoes, as fresh as possible
4 banana shallots
3 cloves garlic
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
1 large cucumber
2 slices stale white bread, soaked in water and squeezed
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt and pepper

Peel the tomatoes by scoring them around the equator and dunking them in boiling water to loosen the skins. Cut them open and discard the seeds. Blacken the skin of the peppers under the grill, pop the steaming peppers in a plastic box with the lid on for a few minutes to loosen the skins, peel and seed. Peel the cucumber, chop the shallots into quarters and mince or otherwise squish the garlic.

Blitz the vegetables and bread to a smooth purée in batches with the other ingredients. Taste for seasoning; you may want to add a little more vinegar or paprika as well as salt. Chill thoroughly and serve cold, with a little more olive oil drizzled over.

Creamy cucumber salad

Here’s an eastern European way with cucumbers. This is particularly lovely if you can get your hands on home-grown cucumbers, which are often sweeter than the ones you find at the greengrocer. The cucumbers and some shallots are salted to drive out excess moisture and make them extra-crisp, then chilled and tossed in sharp dressing with crème fraîche. The mildly acidic dressing reacts with the cucumbers to form a lovely, lightly foaming texture. This salad is delicious with rich meats and with oily fish.

To serve four as a side dish, you’ll need:

1 large cucumber
1 banana shallot
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche or soured cream
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
4 tablespoons snipped chives
Salt and pepper

Slice the cucumber and the shallot as finely as possible, and layer the slices, sprinkling them with salt as you go, in a colander. Put a heavy plate on top of the slices inside the colander, and leave it to drain for four hours. Blot the cucumber and shallot pieces on kitchen paper and put in a large bowl, then chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

Add the chilled crème fraîche, some pepper and the vinegar to the dish and toss the salad vigorously with two spoons. The mixture should be looking frothy. Return to the fridge for half and hour, toss again, dress with the chives and serve cold.

Shepherd’s salad – Coban Salatasi

Turkish saladIf you go to Istanbul expecting kebabs, meatballs and other chunks of protein, you might be pleased to find that there is also a rich tradition of salads, cooked vegetable dishes (especially aubergine) and dolmades, or stuffed vegetables. This simple salad pops up all over the place, and it’s a really good accompaniment for meat dishes – the fresh vegetables and tart lemon juice counter the wonderful oily richness of Turkish food like nothing else.

I made this last night, but the photo at the top of the page is of an identical salad I ate in a little restaurant next to the Bosphorus – unfortunately, I still don’t have my camera so couldn’t photograph last night’s version. Mine turned out pretty much exactly like the restaurant one, though: this is a very quick, very easy dish with half an hour’s thumb-twiddling in the middle.

To serve four, you’ll need:

4 medium tomatoes, very ripe
1 very mild onion
1 cucumber
1 large handful flat leaf parsley
1 mild green chilli
6 tablespoons olive oil
Juice of half a lemon (and more to taste)
Salt

Slice the onion very finely and chop the parsley roughly. Put them together in a bowl and squeeze over the juice of half a lemon and two tablespoons of olive oil. Set aside for thirty minutes before you put the rest of the dish together.

When the thirty minutes is up, dice the tomatoes and peel and dice the cucumber – the pieces of tomato and cucumber should be small and even. Slice the chilli into thin rings. Mix the chilli, tomatoes and cucumber together in your serving dish and dress with the remaining olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. Place the onion slices and parsley on top of the dish and pour over any oily juices from the bowl. Bring the salad to the table with the onion on top, then allow the diners to mix it up themselves.

Ezme – Turkish crushed tomato and chilli salad

It’s been an exciting few days. Some readers will be aware that I have a horrible allergic reaction to lobsters (face swells, airways close, scalp comes out in lumps, I get injected with adrenaline and then sleep for two days). Unfortunately, at a Chinese meal on Sunday where the rest of the family was munching their way through a couple of lobsters while I stuck to crab, I must have accidentally ingested some, because the evening saw my eyelids slowly but surely swelling up to resemble one of those bobbly goldfish. The rest of my face soon followed, and I’ve been lying under a duvet, groaning, ever since.

Then, as soon as I felt well enough to tackle a post here, I realised that I’ve left my camera at a party the day before the lobster incident. Fortunately the party was at my parents’ house, where we were celebrating my lovely Dad’s 60th. The camera is safe and sound, but it is about 60 miles away, full of photos, and this does mean that two of the Turkish posts I was planning on making will have to wait until I have it back. Similarly, today’s post has no accompanying photographs – please imagine a cheering, dark red paste.

Ezme is served as a starter alongside other salady nibbles to be eaten with bread in Turkey. It’s extremely spicy, and also serves as a deliciously fresh cold sauce to go with grilled meats. If you’re in Cambridge, check out the Turkish delicatessen on Mill Road for the hot paprika paste you’ll need. (Tips from readers about where other Turkish delis can be located would be very welcome – please leave a comment.)

To serve six, you’ll need:

½ lb fresh, ripe tomatoes
1 pointy green pepper (the pale sort which is good barbecued)
½ a cucumber
2 spring onions
1 small handful mint leaves
1 tablespoon hot Turkish paprika paste
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Salt, pepper, paprika to taste

Peel the tomatoes and the cucumber, and remove the stalk, interior ribs and seeds of the pepper. Chop the tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and spring onions as finely as you can without reducing them to a pulp (careful pulsing in the food processor will also do the job). Stir in all the other ingredients, tasting for seasoning. Serve at room temperature.

Swedish cucumber salad

Cucumber saladHere’s another Swedish recipe for your smorgasbord. This salad is right up there with my favourite cucumber applications: it’s sweet and tart, and spiked with aromatic dill and plenty of black pepper. This is a fat-free salad, and its clean and crisp taste makes it an excellent side dish where you’re serving up oily foods. It works especially well, for some reason, with fish; this is just fantastic with salmon. If you want to serve up some smoked salmon (or, more appropriately, gravadlax) with your smorgasbord, make the dill sauce here on Gastronomy Domine, which tastes authentically Scandinavian and goes extremely well with these dilly cucumbers.

I’m enjoying cucumbers a lot at the moment, largely because my Mum has been growing some real corkers in her greenhouse. They’re smaller than the kind you buy at the supermarket, but are extremely sweet and with a good flavour. If you too are in a particularly cucumberish mood right now, have a quick look at my recipe for Chinese smacked cucumbers.

To make a Swedish cucumber salad to serve six to eight as part of a smorgasbord you’ll need:

2 cucumbers
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 level tablespoons caster sugar (superfine sugar for Americans)
2 tablespoons boiling water
4 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 small shallot, minced
1 small handful dill, chopped finely

Slice your cucumbers thinly and arrange in a colander, sprinkling with the salt as you go. Put a bowl on top of the sliced, salted cucumbers and weigh it down with the set of weights from your kitchen scales (a heavy book will do the job too if your scales are digital). Salting and pressing the cucumbers like this will drive out some of their moisture, leaving them much crisper, and better able to take up the flavours of the dressing. Leave the weighted colander for an hour (keep it on the draining board so the drips can fall into the sink). Remove the cucumber pieces to a large bowl, chill for an hour and pour off any extra liquid they might have produced.

To make the dressing, dissolve the caster sugar in the boiling water, then add the vinegar, shallot and dill. Mix well, leave to cool (I give mine a quick shock in the freezer) and pour over the chilled cucumber. Serve immediately.

I’m very fond of cucumber salads, and there are several on this blog – click here for a few more.

Smacked cucumber

This is as closely as I’ve been able to duplicate the wonderful cucumber salad at Fuchsia Dunlop’s Bar Shu. It’s an easy accompaniment and it’s great at cutting through rich flavours. The dressing keeps for a week in the fridge; try making a double amount and keeping half for a really quick salad later in the week.

The smacking of the cucumber is an important first step in this recipe. It opens cracks up in the flesh of the vegetable for the dressing to seep into, and means that when you salt the cucumber, there will be more surface area for its liquid to escape from. I use the flat edge of my Chinese cleaver to wallop the cucumber, but you can use a rolling pin if you don’t own a cleaver.

To smack enough for four (although we can easily demolish this amount between two) you’ll need:

1 large cucumber
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar
4 cloves fresh garlic
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon soya sauce
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chilli oil (leave this out if you prefer your cucumber not to be spicy)
Salt to sprinkle

Lay the cucumber on a wooden board and slap it hard with the flat of a cleaver until cracks have opened up all along it. Chop the cucumber into bite-sized pieces, put in a colander and sprinkle with salt to disgorge some of the liquid from the flesh.

Meanwhile, chop the garlic finely and mix it with the sugar, soy and rice vinegar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the oils and set aside.

When the cucumber has been draining for 40 minutes, pat it dry with kitchen paper and place on a large flat plate. Sprinkle over the stirred dressing and serve immediately.