Watermelon Gazpacho - Refreshing, Easy, Vegan & Gluten-Free

I’ve seen some good deals on watermelon lately and while I enjoy eating it simply sliced up, we have a hard time eating an entire watermelon with just two of us in the house. I recently saw a recipe for watermelon gazpacho on my friend JL’s Facebook page that she shared from veganmos.com that you can make with just 4 ingredients so I had to try it, figuring it would be a different way we could use up some of the watermelon. I made it on an evening we had company over so I could get lots of different opinions on how it tasted and it was a huge hit. You can serve it as a soup course, as an appetizer, as the main entrée for a light lunch or dinner or do as I did, and serve it as a dessert.

With watermelon being the main ingredient, you want to make sure you get a good one. Here’s a few tips on how to choose a watermelon:

Look for a firm, symmetrical, and free of major bruises or scars melon. Ripe watermelons should be dark green in color.
The ripest watermelon have the most water and since watermelons are 92% water, your melon should be relatively heavy for its size.
Turn the watermelon over and check out the bottom, which should have a creamy yellow spot (the ground spot.) This is where the watermelon sat on the ground while growing. If the ground spot is white or greenish, it may have been picked too soon.
Make sure you wash the outside of your watermelon because even though you’re not using the rind, your knife is touching the outside as you cut into it.

We enjoyed the gazpacho as is but I experimented with some garnishes and while we liked all of them, our favorite was the chocolate mint that I had growing in the garden, which I thinly sliced. You can of course serve this in a bowl or get creative with pieces you most likely already own.

As a dessert, you can serve this soup in a dessert dish like this, which I topped with the fresh chocolate mint.