Keto gazpacho
No bread, more olive oil. The texture holds up better than you would expect.
- 220
- kcal
- 3g
- protein
- 20g
- fat
- 8g
- carbs
- Prep
- 15 min
- Serves
- 4
Photograph by Larbigno • on Pexels
Ingredients
- 2 lb ripe tomatoes
- 1 cucumber, peeled
- 1 green pepper
- 1 clove garlic
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 2 tbsp sherry vinegar
- Salt
Method
-
1
Roughly chop everything and blend until completely smooth — two minutes, longer than feels necessary.
-
2
With the motor running, pour the oil in slowly. It should turn pale orange and thicken.
-
3
Add the vinegar and salt, then chill at least 3 hours.
-
4
Taste again cold. It will need more salt than it did warm.
Bread out, oil in
Traditional gazpacho is thickened with stale bread, which is both the texture and roughly half the carbohydrate. Take the bread out and the soup is thin and watery unless you replace the body with something else — here, considerably more olive oil than a conventional recipe uses.
Pouring the oil in slowly with the blender running is not fussiness. It creates an emulsion, and the emulsion is what turns tomato juice into soup. Dumping it in at the start gives you an oily liquid that separates in the fridge.
Blend longer than you think
Two full minutes. Gazpacho that has been blended for thirty seconds is a salad drink; two minutes breaks down the tomato skins and pepper fibres completely and the colour shifts visibly from red to a pale orange-pink as air is incorporated. That colour change is how you know it is done.
If you want it silky rather than merely smooth, pass it through a sieve afterwards. It costs you some fibre and gains a restaurant texture.
Season it cold, not warm
Cold blunts perception of salt and acid substantially. A gazpacho seasoned to taste at room temperature will taste flat straight from the fridge. Chill it first, then taste and adjust — it will usually need noticeably more salt and another splash of vinegar than seemed right when it was warm.
Tomatoes matter more than anything else
This is a raw dish with five ingredients, so there is nowhere for a poor tomato to hide. Out of season, tinned San Marzano tomatoes make a better gazpacho than fresh supermarket ones — an unromantic truth worth knowing in February.
What it is worth nutritionally
8 g of carbohydrate a serving against roughly double that for the bread version, and 20 g of fat almost entirely from olive oil. Lycopene, the carotenoid in tomatoes, is fat-soluble and better absorbed in the presence of fat — so the oil is doing nutritional work as well as textural work.
