Bloody Mary Gazpacho

My Bloody Mary Gazpacho recipe is a clever mash-up of your favorite brunch cocktail and a refreshing Spanish chilled soup ~ now you can sip a zesty Bloody Mary out of a bowl!  The cool elegance, the flavors, the garnishes ~ all the little extras are in there (even the vodka.)

Are you a gazpacho person?  I totally am, it’s one of my favorite foods, actually.  And if you’re a gazpacho person I figure you’re probably a Bloody Mary person as well; they’re closely allied in foodland.  With that in mind, you can probably predict that this mash-up just works.  If you’re planning any sort of brunch during the spring and summer months you need to make this.

Here are the players~

The Bloody Mary cocktail ~

A daytime cocktail invented in the 1920s that started out as a relatively tame combo of tomato juice and vodka.  Over the years it expanded to include lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, tabasco, and a dash of celery salt, and is purported to cure a hangover.  In recent times it’s served up heavily and ostentatiously garnished. 

Gazpacho soup ~

An classic Spanish chilled soup made with blended veggies, mostly tomatoes, and flavored with lime, Sherry vinegar, and cilantro.  It’s super healthy and refreshing, and can be an appetizer or lunch.

They’re both chilly, bright, and acidic, and today I’ve borrowed the best from the Bloody Mary to infuse into a deliciously unique gazpacho.   Genius, if I do say so myself ;)

A great gazpacho starts with great tomatoes, and for a small batch like this you’ll need about a pound.  I used Kumato tomatoes, the ones that are an olive green on the outside, and a deep crimson when you cut into them.  They’re super sweet heirlooms, and you can find them in many good supermarkets, and Trader Joe’s carries them.  The flavor is deep, and the color works well for the look of my Bloody Mary gazpacho.  Regular red tomatoes will work, too, the deeper the better.

I love gazpacho so much I’ve even done a multi-hued version with heirloom tomatoes in my Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho.  Each tomato has a different color and a different flavor profile, and they make a gorgeous presentation.

Meal prep your gazpacho ~

One of the nice things about gazpacho is that you can make it in the morning and it will just get better as it chills all day, in fact it will need at least 3 or 4 hours to get nice and cold and allow the flavors to mingle.  If you’re having people over at the end of a hot day, all you have to do is pull this out of the fridge and wait for the compliments. 

My Bloody Mary Gazpacho is pretty authentic, right down to the Old Bay & salt rim on the little glass bowl.  It’s little touches like this, along with the colorful garnishes, that make a creative recipe like this work.  My garnish design was inspired by the talented Heather Cristo, who made epic Chipotle Bloody Marys over at The Pioneer Woman.

Garnishes for your Bloody Mary Gazpacho

• small inner stalks of celery, leaves on
• tail on shrimp (coated in Old Bay seasoning and grilled till they curl)
• cocktail onions
• green or black olives
• small grape or cherry tomatoes
• pickled sweet and hot peppers (check the olive bar at your supermarket)
• gherkins
• crisp bacon (I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t)

How to make creative mash-up recipes ~

• First and foremost, make sure your creative adaptation makes sense.  There needs to be some basic connection between the two recipes that makes culinary sense.  You aren’t going to make a bananas foster mac and cheese.  But you might make a Bananas Foster ice cream.  In this case the Bloody Mary cocktail and the gazpacho have a base of tomatoes and citrus in common, and they’re both perfect for a spring brunch.
• Figure out which is your base recipe, and which is your influencer recipe, in this case I’m making soup, not a cocktail, so I need to keep that in mind.   My final dish has to be pleasing as a soup.
• Decide what can be changed in your base recipe, and what you need to retain to keep the integrity of the dish.  
• In this case I adopted the key flavorings of a Bloody Mary: the Worcestershire sauce, the horseradish, the lemon, the celery salt.  (I look up a few classic recipes to help me identify the flavors.)  Normally in gazpacho I would use lime, sherry vinegar, and cilantro.
• I kept the crushed fresh tomatoes, and the additional finely diced veggies that give gazpacho its wonderful texture. 
• I added vodka to my gazpacho, why not?  ~ this is where the mashup really gets fun.
• I’m left with a delicious recipe that is a combination of the best of two worlds.  If I saw it on a restaurant menu I would order it in a heartbeat.

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