Traditional Andalusian gazpacho

I made the trek this morning to the awe-inspiring Dunwoody Farmers' Market, where I got some lovely, sweet cucumbers and a couple kinds of tomatoes from two different vendors. The tiny multi-colored heirlooms will go into pasta caprese later in the week, and the "regular" (I guess plum?) ones, which were very ripe, made me switch my meal plan around so that I could make gazpacho today.

Contrary to appearances, I don't actually love Spanish food; for one thing, I haven't cooked or eaten enough of it to judge, and for another, olives are one of the few foods I simply cannot eat in any form (except the oil), and they seem to show up in a lot of Spanish dishes. A couple summers ago, I tried making gazpacho, a Cook's Illustrated recipe (as with many popular dishes they have several versions, and I can't recall which I tried), and it was disappointing. I just didn't like the flavor or texture. I wanted to try again, knowing that there can be a wide range of gazpacho styles, so this time I turned to the Andalusian recipe in the first chapter of CI's Restaurant Favorites (it is adapted from Jaleo in D.C., where the famous José Andrés is chef).

The soup is nothing more than a slice of bread for thickener, garlic (which I just realized I forgot!), tomatoes, bell peppers (it called for green, I used yellow), cucumbers, sherry vinegar, and olive oil, pureed with enough water to make it the right consistency, then strained. I do not have a medium-mesh strainer as called for, so I tried to approximate what that would produce by using my fine-mesh strainer and adding back into the soup about half of the solids. The "garnish," which is much more substantial than I am accustomed to associating with the term, simply reprised the vegetables in small dice along with fresh garlic croutons. It was a great soup, and I'd make it again exactly as I did tonight, but I'm glad I cut back the yield to 2 servings so there were no leftovers. It's the sort of thing we wouldn't really crave, but once it's on the table, it seems right and tastes delicious. I served it with our old friend the "Spanish" tortilla, fully Americanized with Frank's sauce because I didn't feel like making Romesco, and ciabatta toasts with Manchego cheese. Which is one Spanish food I really am starting to like.