How to Make MINESTRONE SOUP Like an Italian

This is an Italian minestrone soup. Made easy, fun, and affordable for everyone. This is the best minestrone soup for you and your family. You can use any vegetables that you like for the minestrone, it's completely up to you. But this is an affordable minestrone recipe and these are the ingredients I suggest you to use. Two carrots, one celery stalk, one red onion, half pumpkin, two potatoes, one broccoli, two small cans of diced tomatoes, so 800 grams of diced tomatoes. One small can of mixed beans, so it's about 400 grams. One small can of lentils, some chopped parsley, some rosemary, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. And for me, there is no minestrone without pasta. You need to put the small ditalini pasta in the minestrone. For me, that's how I enjoy minestrone. You don't want pasta? Okay, you remove it, but trust me, minestrone with a ditalini pasta is the way to do it. Last but not least, guys, the Parmigiano rind. So when you buy a Parmigiano block, you cut it, you keep the rind in the freezer, okay? But some shops today, some grocery store, they also sell the rind, okay? So the rind will add amazing flavors to your minestrone, and they will be very tasty and delicious to eat as well. When we chop the ingredients, we want to try and chop all the ingredients the same way, okay? So try and cut the carrots, celery, onion the same way. The pumpkin, it's a little bit bigger, but you can make it smaller if you want. The potatoes should be cut small like the carrots. The broccoli is not that easy to do super small, but you see how small you wanna make them. All right, let's get a nice large pot to cook the minestrone, and what we do, medium heat, we put a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. So be generous with the extra virgin olive oil, be generous. Now we put the soffritto, so the celery, the onion, carrots. What we're also going to do, we're going to get the rosemary. This is what I personally like to do, and cook the rosemary in the soffritto. Trust me, this technique will add beautiful flavors, and I like to have the rosemary a little bit fried. Wow, the rosemary really brings the flavors out. Beautiful, I love it. Now what you need to do, so I want to add just a little splash of water. This will avoid for our soffritto to burn. If you don't want to burn that soffritto. Okay, now this will help. What we're going to do, put a lid on, and let the soffritto cook. The steam will make a soffritto nice and soft. The oil and the rosemary make sure that the soffritto is making love together. So let's wait about 10 minutes now. You know what I love about this recipe, and all the recipes, that we're cooking with love and passion. And when the food is ready, this food that we prepare brings people together at the table and we can have a good time. The power of food. Guys, it looks good to me, to be honest. Okay, now our soffritto is ready. Now we can add the pumpkin, the potatoes, and give it a quick stir. Let's make sure our ingredients make love together. Let's add a little bit more extra virgin olive oil as we go, right. I've seen some people adding stock in the minestrone. It's your personal choice. I've done it in the past too, but trust me, all you need is water. We're actually creating our own stock right now by doing a soup, a minestrone. So let's add water until we kind of cover the potatoes. And the pumpkin. Okay, let's put a little bit more. Now what we do at this point is we let this cook for about 10 to 15 minutes, okay. We just want the potatoes and the pumpkin to get a little bit softer. So you can put on medium high heat and let the ingredients get to know each other. I'm getting excited. I love this moment, okay. It's time to reveal what's happening after 10 minutes. Oh, hi, hi everyone. Bellissimo, bellissimo. Look at those, hello guys. I'm very happy now because it's time to add the diced tomatoes, okay. Look at that, ooh, bellissimo. The reason why I use diced tomatoes is just because it's a little easier, okay. And because diced tomatoes also have a little bit of water in it, it's okay because the minestrone is gonna cook for a while in water. You can also use fresh tomatoes if you want. Please go for it, especially if they are from your garden. Otherwise, diced tomatoes do a great job. Now stir. What we're going to do now, we need to add more water. Be generous with the water, don't be scared, okay. Just put a nice amount of water, okay. Make sure you cover all the ingredients. We are on a medium high heat. And now, the tomato sauce is already adding flavor. Let's cut the parmigiano into small cubes and then we add them in the minestrone right after the tomato. Also wanna add a stick of rosemary in there and one stick will be easy to remove later on. We can also add the broccoli. Okay, now let's go back to stirring. Stir all the ingredients. As you can see, it needs more water. See the broccoli are not emerging in the water. Let's put some more water in there. Fantastic. After the broccoli, we start adding salt and pepper, okay. With the salt, I will say be generous now. And then towards the end, we see how much more salt we need. But as you can see, this is the first time I'm adding salt into this dish. And then we'll start tasting it later on, okay. But I think that's enough salt. Let's put a nice amount of pepper. Okay, stir again. And now let's let this cook for 10 more minutes before we add the beans and lentils. The reason why I'm stirring now is because I wanna make sure the ingredients at the bottom go to the top and the top ones go to the bottom. And again, it's all about making sure all the ingredients cook well. And at this point, we cover it with a lid. For me, it's very important to cover it with a lid. First, because of course the steam, we want the steam. We don't want too much water to evaporate because the water at this point, it turned into soup. And at the same time, I want the flavors to stay inside. I don't want them to go into my kitchen. I want it to stay inside the pot. It's been 10 minutes. Look at this. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. It's beautiful. Look at this, guys. Look how stunning it is. Very important to stir. What I love about this at the moment is the colors. See the beautiful colors that you get? Stunning. Very pretty. Very, very pretty. You know what? It's time to add the lentils and the beans. Time to put the beans in. Now we put the lentils. I'm gonna add a little bit of parsley now. Unfortunately, the parsley will kind of die, okay? But I wanna add some now just to give a little bit of color because I wanna have that greenery in the soup, okay? Can you see that it deserves, it needs a little bit more water? You can see that. So what we do now, we add a little bit more water. See, all the ingredients are covered. What I would say now, put the lid on. On a medium-high heat, in the next 20 minutes, you want to stir about two to three times before the grand final. Oh yeah, the moment that we've been waiting for. The pasta. It's been about seven minutes, so let's stir. See, when I say stir, you don't want them to get stuck to the bottom, okay? You don't want no ingredients stuck to the bottom. Oh, I also found the rosemary here, which I can actually take out now because I think it did its job. Bye-bye, rosemary. And now we have about 14 minutes to go. Okay, it's been 14 minutes in total. Ooh, okay, oh, look at that, beautiful. At this point, 14 minutes, my concern is that we might need to add a little bit of water. So let's check if the ingredients are getting stuck to the bottom. And I can feel it is getting a little bit dry, okay? So make sure you scrape the bottom and I can feel it is getting a little too dry, okay? So we have six minutes to go before we add the pasta. So what I recommend you is to put a large amount of water. It means a lot of water. So basically, they need to swim in the water. Look what I'm talking about, see? Swim in the water, okay? If you put too much water, don't be scared, okay? But basically, they need to swim. So if I scrape the bottom now, I don't feel nothing getting stuck. All the ingredients are kind of floating, okay? All right, we've got five minutes left before we add the pasta. Now time to add the pasta. If you don't want to use the pasta, what I would say is just wait maybe 20, 30 more minutes until the liquid reduce a little bit more. What we have to do now is to check that all the ingredients are cooked, especially the potatoes and pumpkin. We also need to understand if we need more salt. The pumpkin is cooked and it's got beautiful flavors. The potatoes still have a little bit of crunch, but they are very, very soft. There was a piece of Parmigiano-Rein in there. Oh my God, it melted in my mouth. What I suggest right now is to add the salt as much as you want, okay? Use rock salt or sea salt if you want stronger, richer flavors. But this one deserves a lot of salt. I always like to add cold extra virgin olive oil in my plate of minestrone, but I'm gonna add some now. This is just me, I like to do that because we're getting ready for the pasta. I wanna add extra virgin olive oil. This pasta needs 12 minutes to be cooked al dente, but I'm gonna cook it for 10 minutes, two minutes less because being in a hot soup, it will keep cooking later on, okay? So even nine minutes, it's okay. You guys ready? Let's cook it. Now, what the pasta's gonna do. First, it's adding the starch that we want, beautiful starch in the soup. It adds the carbs that you need in the soup. You can always enjoy soup with bread, but trust me, this beautiful pasta takes the soup, the minestrone, to the next level. At this point, we don't use the lid anymore. We just let it cook and boil for 10 minutes. If you don't find this type of pasta and you decide to use, I don't know, macaroni or whatever, always cook the pasta two to three minutes less. If the instruction on the packet says cook it for 10 minutes, you cook it for seven to eight minutes, no more. When the pasta is inside, you have to make sure you stir because what's happening is the vegetables are heavy, heavier than the pasta, and kind of suffocating the pasta. The pasta goes to the bottom, and you don't want that pasta to get stuck to the bottom. So what you want to do, you want to scrape the bottom, okay, so that the pasta doesn't get stuck there and it comes to the top. I think we need to try the pasta now. The pasta should be extremely al dente right now. Mm, mm, it's perfect. Very al dente. So by the time we take this off the stove and serve, the pasta will keep cooking. So let's give it a last stir. Quick stir, look at this, look at that. Look at all the ingredients now getting together, see? It's still watery, but trust me, the pasta is absorbing the water, okay? And the more you keep the pasta in, the more it will absorb it. So don't be scared of having extra water because the extra water will disappear, trust me. And let's get the minestrone off the stove and eat it. The minestrone has been sitting for about five minutes, and look how much the pasta grew, how much water, liquid, absorbed. Can you see that? Can you see why it's so important to make sure you always add water and don't be scared of adding extra water? But look how nice it is. The ingredients have made love together, and this is now ready and perfect for you to enjoy. Look what a beautiful, beautiful dish. It's bellissimo. We are making a large batch today because we can freeze what we don't need today. So you eat today what you want, and then you put this in plastic containers and in the freezer. When you feel like minestrone, you defrost the minestrone, you put it in a pot, make it hot again, and serve it. Today I'm changing your life, guys. And if you're going to freeze it, add more water when you put it in the pot to revive it because the pasta will absorb the extra water you're adding. Nice time to serve. So, so pretty. Ooh, and this will swing in a soup. Sprinkle some parsley on top. Best part of the video recipe. Let's try this minestrone. Mm. Full of flavors. The ingredients really love each other. They really bring happiness together. You can add extra salt, extra pepper, up to you. That beautiful Parmigiano rind just melted in my mouth. Such an important ingredient. Mm, mm. You can use any ingredients you want, seriously. Choose whatever you want, okay? I see people using cauliflower. I'll use it too. Cabbage and zucchini, whatever you want. But the ones you cannot miss is the soffritto, so carrots, onion, and celery. The Parmigiano rind. The potato and pumpkin, they are important, especially the potato. You add starch into the sauce. In my opinion, the pasta. The beans for me are very important, but you can avoid them if you don't want to. But apart from that, use all the ingredients that you want. Thank you so much for watching this episode. I will see you in the next Vincenzo's Plate video recipe. E ora si mangia. Vincenzo's Plate. Mm, it's minestrone time.