Jacques Pépin Makes Cold Tomato-Cucumber Soup

(soft music) - Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "American Masters At Home."

(soft music) During the summer, I like to make cold soup very often.

And very often, in my garden, as you can see, I have those ugly cucumber, oh God.

So, I do a soup, sometimes only with cucumber, sometimes only tomato, sometimes a mixture that I'm doing today.

Here, of course, what you do first, you wanna peel that cucumber, and I do that directly on top of the garbage.

Makes my life easier.

You cut it in half, and you can see a lot of seed.

So, again, you take the seed, took the edge of your fork to go along the side, turn it around to go along the other side, and now to remove it.

I think I need two cup of cucumber.

I'm gonna put two cup of tomato too.

That tomato is a large tomato.

It should be about two cup.

I'll start with the, actually, with the tomato.

What I wanna do is actually press some of the seed out, and I will strain that juice back into my soup.

So, let's see how much do I have here?

About one and three quarter, close to two cups.

Add this juice back in there, or you could put the seed in it too, but I tend to remove it.

I'll start with that in the blender.

Two cups of this I have about a third of a cup of onion, and a jalapeno here.

I'll taste it.

Tastes just like green pepper, no hotness, so I'll probably put some Tabasco in it a little bit later.

And put a little bit of water.

I wanna make sure that the skin of the tomato is processed nicely.

So, here, let's see this.

So, your proportions there are not very important.

If you have a little more cucumber, a little more tomato, doesn't really matter.

So, let's see.

Gazpacho is, of course, specialty of the southern part of Spain.

Now, I have two good cups that I'm gonna put in there.

One teaspoon of salt.

And, as I said, you can always put a bit of Tabasco, especially for me here, it doesn't really have much taste, so I put a few drops of Tabasco, maybe a tablespoon of rice vinegar.

I will taste it.

It's good, and now the yogurt.

So, I'm putting a good cup, cup and a half of Greek yogurt in there.

Again, a little more, a little less, it isn't that crucial.

And, of course, what I have also is a quarter of a cup of olive oil.

And here it is.

Have a beautiful soup, summer soup.

Dash of salt again, always taste.

So, this is it.

My soup is ready now.

Refrigerate it, like, as you can see, a beautiful pink color, What I like to serve, as the garnish on top, is a little julienne or chiffonade, we call, of basil.

Smells wonderful.

And a few drops of olive oil on top, again, for color and taste.

And here we are, tomato-cucumber gazpacho for summer.

Happy cooking.

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Thank you, and happy cooking.

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