This chilled apple gazpacho soup is a great starter or soup course. Green apple and cucumber are finely blended with garlic, ginger, lemon, champagne vinegar and toasted almonds. No cooking involved to get these fresh, bold flavors.
A Zesty Chilled Soup
This apple gazpacho recipe accomplished three goals as a first course for a wine pairing party. First, you can make it a day head of time – giving you a head start. It’s served cold and can handle getting to room temp several hours. This is key as our guests tend to drift in the first hour of our party. And third, it utilized an apple flavor (as it was a Washington themed event) in an unexpected way. It was zesty and tangy as a gazpacho should be.
Wine Pairing
Original Pairing: L'Ecole Semillon General Pairing: Chardonnay, Semillon, Chenin Blanc
Key Ingredients
Green apples: key to this is making sure they don’t brown after you peel and cut them. You can toss them with lemon juice, or just wait to prep until right before you are ready to add them to the blender.
Cucumber: this recipe relies on the cucumber for alot of the liquid. They should be medium and looking fresh (not tired). If they don’t get really liquidy when blended you may need to add a bit of water.
Ginger: the recipe calls for fresh grated ginger. I also frequently buy frozen ginger cubes from Trader Joes. Ginger paste will also work, but as these are more condensed forms I would start with using half the amount (and taste test to add more if desired).
Garlic: fresh garlic is recommended. Really fresh, as older garlic may add bitterness to this dish. Also, timing when to add the garlic is important so it interacts with the lemon juice to also keep it from getting bitter.
Equipment
Blender: I found with my “normal” blender I need to split this recipe into two batches and give a good long time to blend. It can be done, but a higher volume, high-powered blender would make quick work of it.
One in the moderate price range is the Ninja 72oz Professional Blender.
Planning the Dish
While there’s a lot to prep, core and dice – this really shoudn’t take long to put together. You could do this the day of, but I like getting what I can out of the way when doing several courses. The acid from lemon and vinegar will keep it from “browning”, and I did not have issues with it separating overnight.
Timing
1 Day Prior: Prep and blend soup base.
Day of: Prepare garnish and sour cream mixture.
15 min to Serve: Plate quickly and serve immediately to keep it cold. It can be consumed at room temp.
Plating Tips
We used tall shot glasses with little spoons that enabled about 2.5 fluid ounces per person for a taste. The soup was too thick “drink” as a shot.
To “plate” I used a plastic food storage bag (cutting off a corner) to quickly pipe the soup into the narrow shot glasses.
Garnishing can be a simple element or you can layer on multiple items. The pale cream color of the soup will work with any pop of color you may want to add: lime zest, edible flower, bits of thyme or microgreens.
See Resources for plating supply ideas
Pairing Alterations
I tried many variations of flavors prior to finalizing this recipe. It was rather difficult to find a wine that could hold up to these bold flavors. With that said, you could lighten the flavor profile to be less tangy, but not stray from the savory.
Less tangy, Still zesty
To make this dish more approachable for other white wines, I would remove the vinegar and increase the lemon juice to replace.
