This green gazpacho is your new favorite savory fruit soup, bursting with veggies, fruit, and herbs. It’s an arrestingly green way to turn amazing summer produce into a cooling and refreshing dish. Taking a cue from ajo blanco, a white gazpacho that’s enriched by almonds, we give you the option of adding shelled and peeled pistachios, which add creaminess and richness to the soup. Their distinctive nutty flavor complements the sweetness of honeydew melon; floral notes from Thai chile, cucumber, basil, and coconut water; and the grassiness of snap peas, parsley, and bell pepper. To dial up the green coloring, we blanch and shock snap peas and herbs, which also makes the peas a little sweeter and destroys enzymes (polyphenol oxidases) in the herbs that will degrade the color and flavor of the soup as it sits. Blend it all up and get it super cold, then serve it with a big glug of grassy olive oil for a pretty-as-a-picture, green-on-green starter for any meal.

When you think of gazpacho, you probably think of a bright red chilled soup made with the best, reddest tomatoes in existence. Race car red. Ruby red. Fire engine red. Red as Campbell’s tomato soup red, but not cooked, not Campbell’s. Huh? Well, you know what we mean: super red! Our version dials up the red color by incorporating ruby-red watermelon and raspberries. The extra water content, sweetness, and tartness from the fruit helps to avoid the super-tomatoey V8 vibe a lot of gazpacho recipes fall victim to. Our recipe skips the bread and alliums that typically bulk up gazpacho, which keeps the soup super refreshing and light and helps extend its refrigerator shelf life: raw alliums like garlic and onion produce pungent gases after being pulverized, which can get in the way of the more delicate fruit flavors. To season the soup, we use a mix of acids (orange juice, lemon juice, white balsamic, and sherry vinegar—and malic acid, if you use it), which gives it extraordinary depth of flavor and a nicely balanced acidity and sweetness.

This recipe is a loose riff on ajo blanco, aka white gazpacho, from the Andalusia region of Spain. It is usually made with almonds, bread, and a healthy amount of garlic. Our version omits the garlic and uses homemade nut milk and grapes for a super-refreshing ivory chilled soup that’s perfect for the dog days of summer. The key to the soup’s flavor—and color—is fresh nut milk. Using raw, whole almonds yields a better flavor than using skin-on almonds, which means you have to take the extra step of slipping off their skins. A small amount of pine nuts boosts the nutty flavor of the milk and gives it an even creamier texture thanks to extra fat content. When blended with earthy whole-grain bread, the mixture offers a perfect backdrop for sweet green grapes, sherry vinegar, and lemon juice. Incorporating some floral notes from herbs is important, but blending them into the soup would dull the flavor and yield an unappealing color. Instead, we fold chopped parsley and mint into the soup right before serving to maximize flavor while keeping the soup pristinely white.

This golden-hued gazpacho is a celebration of all the yellow and orange tomatoes of the tomato season—it’s like sunshine in a bowl. The focus of the flavor is on melon and tomatoes, and one of the keys to this recipe is finding great produce. Unlike more traditional gazpachos, we skip the bread and the alliums—there’s nothing to mask the flavor of your fruit, so get good stuff. You don’t have to worry too much about the color of that produce—the carrots, turmeric, and yellow bell pepper will make the soup plenty gold—so focus on flavor. For the best texture, we like using a meat grinder. Yup, a meat grinder. Fitted with a fine die, the meat grinder produces a beautifully textured soup—smoothly chunky, if that makes sense—that’s way more interesting than a purée of the same ingredients made with a blender or food processor. While our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/white-gazpacho white] and [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/green-gazpacho green] gazpachos require the use of a countertop blender to pulverize nuts and grape skins, a coarser purée works just fine for this soup’s ingredients and makes the soup seem more substantial. With some freshly chopped herbs stirred in and a generous drizzle of good olive oil, keeping cool has never been so refreshing or delicious.

During their all-too-short season, green peas are a chef favorite for chilled soups. Brightened with a fresh herb like tarragon or mint, they deliver a hit of clean, green flavor that feels emblematic of everything we all love about spring. For a shot of spring in the dark days of winter, frozen peas come in handy. We microwave them along with shaved onion and garlic, then blend with fresh tarragon leaves to create a fine purée. (You can sub in fresh or thawed frozen peas too, though keep in mind that cook time will vary.) Once the soup has chilled, we garnish with fresh ricotta and lemon zest, plus a drizzle of finishing oil. It tastes great, looks lovely, and involves just 20 minutes of work—three qualities you’ll welcome at any time of year.

Gazpacho! Everyone knows what it is, right? Maybe. In what might be the strongest example of menu word association, as soon you see gazpacho listed among appetizers and salads, your brain immediately reads it as “cold soup.” (Maybe some of your brains do something a little more interesting—“light liquid lunch,” say, or “salad smoothie.”) “Watermelon gazpacho”? Cold watermelon soup. “Avocado gazpacho”? Yup, cold avocado soup. And yet gazpacho is a specific dish, one with a well-established provenance. Most people would be able to tell you that, actually, it’s a cold tomato soup from Spain. Others might say, actually, it’s a cold Spanish soup, but it doesn’t need to be made with tomatoes, as it was enjoyed long before the Columbian exchange. So what is it? And how does one make gazpacho and “gazpachos” these days? What’s acceptable? What’s authentic? What tastes great? Read on for our approach to making soups in the style of one of the most iconic cold soups in existence.