Gazpacho is Andalucía's gift to hot weather — raw, cold, alive with tomato and olive oil and sherry vinegar. It's also, traditionally, mostly water. Replace that water with a bottle of slow-simmered Beef Bone Broth and the whole thing changes: silkier body, deeper savoury base, and 7.6g of collagen carried quietly through the batch. Same fifteen minutes. Same blender. Considerably more to show for it.
Why Gazpacho Is the Perfect Vehicle
Most ways of eating collagen involve something warm, a mug of broth, a soup, a stew. In August in Marbella, that's a hard sell. Gazpacho solves it: a cold soup that wants a savoury liquid base, served at the exact moment of year when nobody wants to drink anything hot.
It also happens to be built from raw vegetables at their peak, tomatoes, cucumber, green pepper, garlic, good oil. Nothing is cooked, so nothing is lost. Adding broth doesn't dilute that. It gives it a floor to stand on.
Collagen Gazpacho
Serves 4 as a bowl, or 6 poured into glasses. Fifteen minutes of work, four hours of patience.
Ingredients
- 1.2kg very ripe tomatoes (Raf or good vine tomatoes), roughly chopped
- 1 Spanish green pepper, or half a green bell pepper, deseeded
- 1 cucumber, peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 small clove of garlic — one, not two
- 50g day-old rustic bread, crusts removed
- 500ml Beef Bone Broth (one bottle), gently warmed to liquid
- 60ml extra virgin olive oil, plus more to finish
- 20ml sherry vinegar (Jerez, if you can)
- 1 tsp fine sea salt, plus more to taste
- A pinch of ground cumin — optional, and traditional in parts of Andalucía
Method
- 1. Loosen the broth. Warm the full 500ml gently in a small pan over low heat until it's liquid again, about a minute. Don't let it simmer. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
- 2. Soak the bread. Tear the bread into the warm broth and leave it for 10 minutes, until completely soft. This is what gives gazpacho its creamy body without a drop of dairy.
- 3. Blend. Add the tomatoes, pepper, cucumber, garlic, vinegar, salt, and the bread-and-broth mixture to a blender. Blend on high for a full two minutes, longer than feels necessary. You want it completely smooth.
- 4. Emulsify. With the blender still running, pour the olive oil in a slow, steady stream. The colour will lift from red to a pale coral and the texture will turn velvety. This step is the difference between good gazpacho and great gazpacho — don't rush it.
- 5. Sieve. Pass it through a fine sieve, pressing with the back of a ladle. It takes three minutes and it's worth every one of them.
- 6. Chill. At least four hours, ideally overnight. Gazpacho is not finished until it's properly cold — the flavours don't fully arrive until they're chilled.
- 7. Taste again, cold. Cold dulls both salt and acid. It will almost certainly want a little more of each than it did at room temperature.
To Serve
Pour into shallow bowls or straight into glasses. Finish with a thread of olive oil, a little finely diced cucumber and green pepper, and cracked black pepper. If the gazpacho has thickened in the fridge — collagen again — loosen it with a splash of cold water and whisk.
What's in Each Bowl
- Roughly 1.9g of collagen per serving (7.6g across four bowls) — type I and III, in the peptide form your body absorbs directly
- Glycine and glutamine from the broth, supporting the gut lining and calming inflammation
- Lycopene from raw tomatoes, and the polyphenols in a good extra virgin olive oil
- Naturally low in sugar, no dairy, no thickeners, nothing your body doesn't recognise
Cook's Notes
- Skip the bread for a lighter, keto-friendly version. Add 30ml more olive oil to keep the texture; the broth still carries the body.
- Don't add ice. The instinct is to chill it fast, but ice waters down everything you just built. Time in the fridge, not ice in the blender.
- Salmorejo variation: double the bread to 100g, drop the cucumber and pepper, and use 300ml of broth instead of 500ml. Thicker, richer, and traditionally topped with jamón and chopped egg, which pushes the protein higher still.
- It keeps three days in a sealed glass jar in the fridge, and it's better on day two.
The Broth to Use
Our Beef Bone Broth is slow-simmered for 16 hours from Galician grass-fed bones, pasteurised in glass, never plastic. No powders, no concentrates, no additives. One bottle makes one batch of this gazpacho — and the gel you'll find when you open it cold is exactly the reason it works.
Andalucía has been making this soup for centuries. It didn't need improving. But it did leave room for one honest addition.
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