Gazpacho

Chop the tomatoes, cucumber and green pepper roughly. The blender does the fine work, and all this stage needs is surface area for the salt.

Tip them into a large bowl with the 8g of fine salt and turn them over.

Stand them at room temperature for 30 minutes, until a good centimetre of juice has collected in the base of the bowl.

Tear the bread into the bowl and press it under the juices.

Leave it for 10 minutes, until it has gone completely soft.

Soak the bread in that juice rather than in water. It is a thickener, not a filler: its starch holds the oil and the vegetable juice together, and a gazpacho made without it separates into pulp and water within the hour.

Add the garlic clove to the bowl.

Use one clove and no more. Raw garlic goes on getting stronger while the soup chills, and a bowl that tasted balanced in the blender can be harsh by the time it is cold.

Blend in two batches, filling the jug no more than two-thirds full.

Run the machine for a full 2 minutes a batch, longer than feels necessary, until the mixture is completely smooth and has turned from red to a pale orange-pink.

Pour the 120ml of olive oil in a thin stream with the blender running.

Do not tip the oil in at the start with everything else. Added slowly into a moving blender it breaks into droplets the soup can hold, which is what makes gazpacho creamy; poured in at once it stays as a slick that rises to the surface in the fridge.

Add the sherry vinegar and blend for another 10 seconds.

Pour the soup through a coarse sieve into a jug, pressing hard on the pulp with a ladle and scraping the underside of the mesh.

Do not skip the sieve. Tomato skin and cucumber seed are what make a blended raw soup gritty on the tongue, and this is the only step that takes them out.

Stir in the ice-cold water a little at a time, until the soup pours like single cream rather than sitting in a heap on the spoon.

Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, until it is properly cold rather than merely cool.

Taste it only when it is cold, and correct the salt and the vinegar then. Cold flattens both, and a soup seasoned warm always tastes of nothing straight from the fridge.

Stir it well before serving, since it settles as it stands.

Ladle it into chilled bowls.

Scatter the diced cucumber over.

Finish each bowl with a thread of olive oil.

Keep it covered in the fridge and drink it within two days.

Treat it as the raw food it is. Nothing in it has been cooked, so it goes back in the fridge as soon as it has been served rather than standing on a warm table through an afternoon.