Gazpacho is A Salad

First the reason I’m even here blogging about this is because I read a quote years ago about how knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit and wisdom is knowing to not put tomatoes in a fruit salad. I learned about Gazpacho soup and felt like this was the white whale I was looking for, proof that tomatoes can be the centerpiece of a fruit salad. If you don’t know what Gazpacho is, it’s a cold soup(supposedly) made up of tomatoes, olive oil, vinegar, garlic, cucumber and other vegetables according to Wikipedia. Really what’s the difference between something like bruschetta and gazpacho, it seems to me that gazpacho is a soup because it’s served in a bowl and bruschetta is an open faced sandwich because its served on bread. I digress and will talk about sandwiches in a later blog probably with friends from my past(some old coworkers argue that everything is a soup). Enough with the chitter chatter its time to make my argument which is simple, soups must be cooked where as salads are not. When you start to dissect gazpacho you can make the argument that the olive oil and vinegar act as the salad dressing. The tomatoes and cucumbers are known to be in salads and all you are really doing is replacing the lettuce with tomatoes. From there I’d go as far to argue that both cucumbers and tomatoes are botanically fruits and olive oil and vinegar the the dressing so therefore gazpacho is the original tomato fruit salad. You may be thinking to yourself well why isn’t tomato soup or tomato bisque a salad mr smarty pants. I’d say that tomato soup has cooked ingredients in it; specifically you use some type of broth with the soup. You can serve tomato soup cold but to make it tomato soup instead of gazpacho you have to add vegetable or chicken stock which means it has cooked ingredients in it. When looking at something like tomato bisque it’s a little harder to discern. The argument being you have to heat it up and add cream. My definition of a salad therefore is the main ingredient of a salad must never be cooked and if the cooked portion of the salad is needed it becomes a soup. Lucky for the entire world I have no say in the matter and I’ll let the chefs and scientist argue over everything. I’m just here to throw the ball out and see who plays.

Have a good Monday!