"ColdSoup" news and stories

You can't talk about cold soups without talking tomatoes. Garden-fresh gazpacho is the go-to soup for summer. If you roast the tomatoes, as in this Kitchen Daily recipe, you'll add depth of flavor. On the sweeter side, though, is a chilled soup of yellow tomatoes blended with sweet yellow peppers and banana peppers, along with garlic and herbs.

Blogger Chiot's Run not only makes tomato soup, she cans it, along with pickles and sauerkraut. (See her recipes here). On a cold winter's day, to taste the tomatoes of summer (not the bland hothouse stuff that's around then), is a gift. So if you're ready to boil the Ball jars, and set up a canning operation, go for it (and check out Eugenia Bone's how-to book Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods). And for pickling, you can't beat Chris Schlesinger, John Willoughby, and Dan George's Quick Pickles: Easy Recipes for Big Flavor.

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Watermelon can take you from sweltering to chilled in the time it takes to eat a slice and spit the seeds (if you're so inclined). So logic (and the nonstop heat) would dictate that you include it in as many dishes as possible this summer. Photographer pellis pureed his melon and combined it with Serrano chiles, lemongrass and ginger (among other ingredients), then added lump crabmeat tossed with cilantro and olive oil, and gave it a squeeze of lime. The result is a spicy cold Thai soup that is just as delicious served hot. (Try the Gourmet magazine recipe.)

Watermelon also makes a gorgeous gazpacho, as in this KitchenDaily recipe. Sure, it's tomato season, but when you've got a 10-pound watermelon to play with, live a little.

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Soup knows how to chill in August. You just have to give it half a chance. So for the next four days we're going to feature a few cold soups you may want to put in rotation when the garden is giving and the temperatures hit their peak.

Carrot and ginger are a good team, on the order of, say, Fred and Ginger, and this soup, from photographer bsmccoy and a recipe from Guy Fieri, spices it up with garlic, thyme and black pepper. But it also has a mellow side, with yogurt and honey. He uses a chicken or vegetable stock as a base, and a potato to give it more heft.

On the flip side, this Kitchen Daily recipe for chilled creamy carrot-ginger soup keeps it simple, made with little more than the two main components plus buttermilk, water and salt. Either way, you'll have the sunniest-looking soup around, the better to keep you cool.

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Chilled Summer Soup. Photo: The Skinny Chef

When the summer heat wave hits, I start to think about recipes that don't require the oven or stove top. Chilled, blended summer soups can be really flavorful, are easy to make and only require a few fresh seasonal ingredients. I like to use an immersion blender to put them together but an old-fashioned blender works just as well.

All these healthy, fast soups can be made hours in ahead and tweaked to your own taste. For a picnic, use disposable paper drinking cups. Or for a more elegant presentation, serve them in chilled shot glasses or espresso cups passed on a little tray. If you're headed to the beach, pour the soups into a thermos and pack it in your beach bag.

It's the tail end of summer and my local farmer's market is bursting with cucumbers. Baskets are overflowing with bumpy, crunchy picklers and cool, mild slicers. Lemon cukes practically beg to be eaten like apples. My three-year-old loves cucumbers and she picks one from every produce vendor at the market as we go along. "Here comes the cucumber girl," they say. I then drag my heavy bag home and whip up a batch of cold cucumber soup.

I love soup. It's a comfort food for me and I eat it year-round. All summer long I make quarts and quarts of cold soups like gazpacho or vichyssoise, but to me, icy, cucumber soup is the most refreshing of the bunch. It's like summer in a bowl.