Artist’s Palate: Christian Louboutin’s salmorejo

Few designers have been as bonded to a specific colour as Christian Louboutin. His soaring stilettos are distinguished by their vivid red undersides, a feature created in 1993 using an assistant’s nail polish and ubiquitous ever since. As his empire grew, so the same shade of red (a precise Pantone) made its way on to men’s shoes, baby shoes, fragrance packaging and, naturally, became a nail polish. A quarter of a century on, Louboutin’s claim to the colour has even been affirmed by the EU’s highest court, which ruled that the brand had exclusive rights to using it on the sole of any shoe, regardless of shape. Not surprisingly, the footwear maven’s favourite dish, salmorejo, takes on a similar hue. He calls this chilled concoction of tomatoes and bread ‘the image of sunrise; of hot and long days’.

Ingredients
200g baguette, torn into chunks
12 tomatoes, skinned, deseeded and roughly chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 red peppers, deseeded and finely chopped
20ml sherry vinegar
160ml extra virgin olive oil
jamon serrano and hard-boiled eggs, to serve

Recipe
Place the baguette chunks in a bowl and cover with boiling water and clingfilm. In a different bowl, do the same with the tomatoes, garlic and peppers. Leave both bowls to stand for an hour.

After an hour, squeeze out the bread and pour away the soaking liquid. Drain the tomato mixture, reserving some of the soaking water. In a blender, whizz together the bread, tomato mixture, vinegar and olive oil until super smooth. Add a little of the reserved soaking water if necessary.

Season with salt and serve with a drizzle of olive oil, some diced jamon serrano and and crumbled hard-boiled eggs.

As originally featured in the September 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*234)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Christian Louboutin website