Try This Refreshing Cold Cucumber Soup Recipe | Jacques Pépin Cooking at Home | KQED

Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin and I'm cooking at home. Another one of my favorites from my garden in summer is cucumber soup. When the cucumbers start coming, they come all over the place. They are not particularly beautiful too, but I do soup. Gloria makes a great salad of sliced cucumber, taking the seed out with sliced onion and you cure the cucumber with salt and it keeps a couple of weeks in the refrigerator. Then I have mint also in my garden. So some are pretty bad here, but I would pick up a good cup. You know, those proportions are not that important here. You like it with more mint, with less mint, with no mint at all. It's okay. But here for about four people, I have a good two and a half pound of cucumber and like a good cup of mint here, which I said, could be a little more, as you can see, I mean, loose mint in there. This is pure mint, it's quite strong. I put it in there. About two or three clove of garlic. This is small garlic, again, from my garden too. My wife will peel it. It's a pain in the neck to peel. And I have a jalapeno pepper here. I think I'm going to put, maybe, I don't know if I put till about half of one. Let's see whether it's strong. This one has practically no taste. I could probably put a whole one, two and the next one. So you have to test it because it does change. Okay. And your tolerance also, you may like it with a lot or with not much. Okay. Now here is my cucumber. What I do, I cut the end of it, the garden and peel it, of course. So here with my cucumber, I cut the end of it until I see the seed here and around, piece here, piece here. Even if you have a few seeds in here, it doesn't really matter, but I usually avoid all center with all those seeds here. Here it is. Especially, as I said, when those start coming in the garden, I can't pick that up every day. Okay. All right. So here it is. I probably have a pound and three quarters here out of two and a half pounds. And I like to do it in the blender or the food processor is okay. I have a cup of water here. I'm going to put about half of it to start. See, salt, fair amount of salt. And let's see now. Okay. Let's see now. I tested this. Yeah. And I'm going to put a good cup of yogurt here. That's basically it. Let's see now what it tastes like. I need a bit more salt in there. I think I put a little pinch of sugar. I'm going to put there and my paper was not very hot. So I'm going to put a dash of Tabasco, but test it. If your paper is hot, you don't need to. Okay. So that's about here now. Let's see how much I have. Enough for four, practically. Yeah. You can see I have a good five cup here. A good five cup. You can have it a bit thinner if you want. The taste of summer. So look at that. A beautiful soup here, but you know what? I forget the olive oil in there. Usually I put olive oil, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in there. You know what? I'm going to put a little bit on top as a decoration and I think it's going to be beautiful. Anyway. Yeah. Even if you put it in there, maybe you should put some like this. It looks good. And then the little spring of mint that I have here. And this is it. It's a nice, elegant first course for a summer dinner. Happy cooking.