(fast Italian music)
- Hi, I'm Jerry James Stone
and you're watching Cooking Stoned.
And on today's episode
we're gonna make a watermelon gazpacho.
The first thing we need to do for this recipe
is cut open our watermelon,
so I'm gonna begin by cutting it in half.
Then I'm going to cut these halves into layers,
or thick rings and then cube it from there.
I'm gonna just cut them into about maybe like, inch cubes.
We want to measure out six cups, so that's the plan,
so, you wanna just get it small enough
so you can measure out six cups.
Now that the watermelon is ready to be pureed,
before I do that I'm gonna go ahead
and just show you how to peel tomatoes.
So, the thing about tomatoes,
depending on what you're using them for,
you can use the whole tomato, or you can just use
the flesh of the tomato.
For this recipe I just want the flesh
because I just want, I don't want the liquid from it
as much as I want the flavor.
So, the first thing I'm gonna do is trim the bottom
of the tomato so that it sets flat.
And then using my knife, I'm going to cut
the tomato around these edges.
Now the reason I'm doing that,
if you look here inside this tomato
you can see that there's these little pockets,
little membrane here right, that contains all the seeds.
So, I really only want this fleshy part.
The ring that you see right here,
that's what I want to cut away.
And I'm gonna leave the actual membrane itself
as a whole, in a ball.
So you just do that, by kind of taking your knife
and cutting a petal off, like that.
And you go around the whole tomato,
just trimming off the petals.
Now, I do this when I make salsa
because, once again I want a real strong tomato flavor
and I don't want it to be watered down.
And so I'm just trying to reduce
how much liquid I get from the tomato
compared to how much flavor I get from the tomato.
If you don't have real sharp knives,
or maybe you're doing this for the first time,
I suggest using a serrated knife instead of one like this
because tomatoes are really slippery
and you could cut yourself
and we don't want that to happen.
But anyway, when you're done with this
you're left with this kind of ball.
And the thing that's really great about this
is you don't have to throw it away.
You can actually use it in soup stocks
or if you're making marinara cook it down
but don't just discard it.
But for this recipe we're going to use this.
So now I've done the watermelon and the tomatoes
and we're gonna go ahead and do the cucumber.
Now I'm actually a fan of eating the peel on the cucumber,
I actually like it, the bitterness is appreciated.
But for this recipe, because...
Here's the thing, if you add red and green
you're going to get brown.
So we don't really to add this dark green
to our recipe, we want to just get the flesh of the cucmber
and not the peel.
Because we don not want a brown gazpacho.
So begin by peeling off the darker color.
Just how we removed the skin for color we're going to remove
some of the seeds from the cucumber too.
And the reason we do that is because
it's just gonna add pulp once we puree it.
And, I mean, never a reason to puree it
only to filter it out.
So just go ahead and remove some of the seeding,
you don't have to be super perfect about it
just get some of it out there.
And then we're going to dice up the cucumber and puree it
like we would the watermelon and tomato.
We're now going to puree each of our three key ingrdients
being the watermelon, and the tomato, and the cucumber.
Puree them as well as you can and then we're just going to
run them through a sieve to remove any of the chunks.
The reason I do this, now you don't have to,
but the watermelon sort of has a delicate,
it makes a sort of a delicate gazpacho
and so I find that it's just much more appealing
when it's a smooth soup as opposed to really chunky.
So just let that run through.
So now that we've strained out our juice,
here's the watermelon and cucumber and tomato juice,
we're gonna add that to a large bowl.
Add in our teaspoon of sugar,
our cilantro and our fresh basil,
and we're gonna add one lime, juiced.
Add a pinch of salt,
and I almost forgot to add in the Serrano chili there.
Definitely want that in there.
Mix that all together and then we're just going to
chill this in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
(fast Italian music)