How to make the perfect chilled cucumber soup – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to Make the Perfect…

On the first really hot day of the year, I went out and bought a carton of gazpacho from sunnier climes - when it's so hot your sneakers stick to the tarmac, even I tend to lose my appetite for everything except cold liquids. And there's nothing more refreshing than cucumber, a vegetable that's 96% water and 100% green and delicious freshness. Many cultures around the world have a cucumber soup recipe in their repertoire – Iranian abdoogh khiar, Indian kheere ka shorba, and Polish chłodnik ogórkowy, to name a few – and here is mine.
The Cucumber
It's time to focus on the cucumber, so often simply chopped up and added as a last minute addition to a salad, as more than a crunchy piece on the side. Most soup recipes call for it to be peeled before use (and if you plan on serving it in fancy little cups, then that might be the way to go), but I like the slightly bitter flavor of the paper-thin coating on your average British cucumber, so I'll keep it. I would remove the seeds though, as they have very little flavor and may leave your soup rather runny. (Note that if the cucumbers you have are bigger in skin, peel them; it's a minute's work, after all.)
Chef Anthony Demetre warns readers of his book Today's Special to avoid the temptation to skip "the process salting and disgorging: cucumber juices may be less bitter than they used to be, but they're still quite indigestible." He and Simon Hopkinson sprinkle the chopped pieces with salt and let him extract the juice from the flesh, which leads down an interesting rabbit hole that ends with the discovery that "snoreless cucumbers" (as Jane Grigson notes, they are "timidly known") are a relatively recent phenomenon in the very long history of cucumber appreciation . They now seem to be almost the only show in town in the UK (unless chef and food writer Thom Eagle informs me, you're in luck with heritage varieties), and salting them risks making the finished product rather salty for some palates, so I'll skip this step - but, again, if you're using home-grown or otherwise breezier fruit, as Grigson also charmingly calls it, you might want to. Simply sprinkle them with a little salt then leave them in a colander for about half an hour before proceeding with the recipe.

Recipe Jul 6, 2022 0 115 Add to Reading List

How to make the perfect chilled cucumber soup – recipe | Felicity Cloake's How to Make the Perfect…

On the first really hot day of the year, I went out and bought a carton of gazpacho from sunnier climes - when it's so hot your sneakers stick to the tarmac, even I tend to lose my appetite for everything except cold liquids. And there's nothing more refreshing than cucumber, a vegetable that's 96% water and 100% green and delicious freshness. Many cultures around the world have a cucumber soup recipe in their repertoire – Iranian abdoogh khiar, Indian kheere ka shorba, and Polish chłodnik ogórkowy, to name a few – and here is mine.

The Cucumber

It's time to focus on the cucumber, so often simply chopped up and added as a last minute addition to a salad, as more than a crunchy piece on the side. Most soup recipes call for it to be peeled before use (and if you plan on serving it in fancy little cups, then that might be the way to go), but I like the slightly bitter flavor of the paper-thin coating on your average British cucumber, so I'll keep it. I would remove the seeds though, as they have very little flavor and may leave your soup rather runny. (Note that if the cucumbers you have are bigger in skin, peel them; it's a minute's work, after all.)

Felicity Cloake's Cucumber Soup 01a: it's a cucumber.

Chef Anthony Demetre warns readers of his book Today's Special to avoid the temptation to skip "the process salting and disgorging: cucumber juices may be less bitter than they used to be, but they're still quite indigestible." He and Simon Hopkinson sprinkle the chopped pieces with salt and let him extract the juice from the flesh, which leads down an interesting rabbit hole that ends with the discovery that "snoreless cucumbers" (as Jane Grigson notes, they are "timidly known") are a relatively recent phenomenon in the very long history of cucumber appreciation . They now seem to be almost the only show in town in the UK (unless chef and food writer Thom Eagle informs me, you're in luck with heritage varieties), and salting them risks making the finished product rather salty for some palates, so I'll skip this step - but, again, if you're using home-grown or otherwise breezier fruit, as Grigson also charmingly calls it, you might want to. Simply sprinkle them with a little salt then leave them in a colander for about half an hour before proceeding with the recipe.