Backpacking Gazpacho

Place large tomatoes in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain and fill pot with cold water to cool the tomatoes. Cut an X at one end of each tomato and the skins will peel off easily.

Dice the large tomatoes, cucumber, red bell pepper, onion, and garlic. Peel and remove seeds from cucumber before dicing. If desired, you can scrape out the seeds from the tomatoes before dicing.

Place the diced vegetables in a bowl, and then grate the peel of one lemon into the mix. After grating, cut up the lemon and add the juice.

Place cherry tomatoes into a blender and blend until smooth. Add blended cherry tomatoes to diced vegetables in bowl.

Stir in all seasonings and run the whole mix through the blender until smooth. Depending on the size of your blender, it makes take a couple of trips through.

Spread 1⅓ cups of gazpacho on trays. Dehydrate for approximately twelve hours at 135° F.

After ten hours, the gazpacho can be peeled off the non-stick sheets and put back into the dehydrator for a couple more hours, directly on the mesh sheets. (Tomatoes have a fairly high sugar content which makes the dried leather a little sticky. The extra time in the dehydrator reduces the stickiness.)

Once the gazpacho leather is more brittle than leathery, run it through the blender and turned it into powder. To dry the powder even more, put the bowl of powder in the dehydrator for thirty minutes, stirring it a few times.

1 serving: ¼ cup gazpacho powder, 1-2 spoonfuls of olive oil, 1 cup cold or hot water

Combine a quarter-cup of gazpacho powder with one cup water in a container with a tight-fitting lid. Shake container and wait at least thirty minutes for best results. When ready to eat, add one or two spoonfuls of olive oil and shake the container again.