Minestrone Soup Recipe

I do love a good minestrone soup. I've tried quite a few over the years but this is the one I keep coming back to. It comes from one of my old time life books, The Cooking of Italy. It's finished with a simple herb and garlic garnish, a little grated cheese on top and it's such a comforting and delicious bowl of soup. Over the years I've made a few changes to this recipe just using what's available today. So I hope any Italians watching this video will forgive me for calling it a minestrone. So there's quite a few things that go in this soup and a little bit of chopping and just recently I picked up a vegetable chopper from the op shop for five dollars and they come with so many attachments but I only use two and it's the fine little dice or the one I have here, the larger dice and I love using this for minestrone because all the vegetables are the same size or you could just use a knife or whatever you have that you like to use. So these are just two small carrots and in the recipe on the website I'll put the measurements in grams as well. What I used today, I weighed them all already for you, so easy. You can get them for twenty dollars brand new I think these days but they make such light work of this. And then I have two medium sort of potatoes here and I have one large zucchini, this is quite a large one and that's just filled up this and these vegetables get cooked together along with one large stick of celery or I've just got two smaller sticks here. And you'll need one smallish onion and for that one I'll use the small dice. Now if you do buy one of these, a few things to know, these are very sharp and also I don't overload what I put on here it's tempting but you know you'll end up picking it out of here and the third thing most important don't put it in the dishwasher because it will shrink and it won't work again. But look at that, finally diced onion in like a second. Now you'll also need a leek, a small leek and if you can't get a leek just use another small onion instead and this one I'll cut by hand because I need to rinse them. And I'll put them in a colander and go and give them a quick rinse just to get out any hidden dirt. And these get fried separately with the onion and I think that's all I can use my nicer dicer for. Now this soup is easily made vegetarian, just leave out the bacon and easily made vegan as well, any butter I use in this recipe just swap it for olive oil. So I have just two rashes of bacon here and I'm just going to remove the rind but keep the fat because that's why the bacon is added, one of the main reasons. You'll see soon I'm going to render it down. Now the original recipe calls for salt pork which is a real fatty piece of the pig but however I can't get that in Australia and you know sometimes I use speck which is great but bacon works beautiful as well. And all I want to do here is cut it into a fine dice, well a small dice, a rough dice actually. So you also need some tomatoes and you can use about 500 grams a pound maybe of fresh ripe tomatoes just roughly chopped, you don't have to worry about skinning them or removing the seeds. Or you can just use one 400 gram tin of crushed tomatoes or peeled tomatoes. These days I prefer using the whole peeled tomatoes because I find they're less acidic and with a clean hand I just squash them. Now you also need beans and the original recipe says to use dried beans and I've done that plenty of times and I'll leave the instructions for that in the recipe on the website. However there are so many things going in here that tinned beans work absolutely fine and I'm just using cannellini beans today. The recipe calls for haricot beans, you can use any white beans or even pinto beans. And what I'll do is I'll just go and rinse these so they're ready and set them aside. Now this recipe calls for rice but you could also use pasta if you prefer but I love using the rice and contrary to many recipes I really enjoy using arborio rice because I just think it puffs up beautifully and it's a lovely mouthfeel when you eat it. And this is like 120 grams a half a cup Australian and the only thing I do to it is rinse it because I want to remove that excess starch. And I like having my ingredients ready because it just makes the cook more enjoyable and things get cooked in stages you know but just using the one pot there's a bit of out and in but you'll see it's so worth it. So I have a 7 litre stock pot here you could use a 5 litre one but it does make quite a lot of soup. Now I've got 60 grams of butter and when the butter starts foaming then I add the potatoes, the carrots, the zucchini and the celery and over a medium heat I continually toss these for about two minutes. I don't want anything browned but I want the vegetables nice and sealed and you know you might think why do this step and seriously it adds flavour and that's long enough it's been three minutes and now I just tip them back into the bowl and set them aside. Then into the same pan over a moderate heat I add a splash of oil and then the bacon and I stir this constantly until the bacon is crisp and it is rendered as fat and don't worry if the bottom of your pot is getting brown like mine the soup will pick up all that fond on the once we put the liquid in and that is all flavour and once the bacon has rendered most of its fat and it's starting to become crispy I transfer it to a paper lined towel to drain but keep all that fat in the pan and then I add the onion and the leeks and cook stirring that often so that's only been about three minutes and that's enough most of the fond has been picked up and the liquid that I'm about to add will pick up the rest. Now I add the crushed tomatoes one and a half litres of chicken stock but I'm just going to use water and I'll just put it in that bowl to get the rest of those tomatoes 1500 mils then I add the sautéed vegetables from earlier along with any lovely butter that was in there because I added water and not chicken stock I'm just using chicken stock powder and I'm going to add three big teaspoons one bay leaf a few parsley sprigs a teaspoon of salt I can always add more later same with the pepper and I'm going to bring this to the boil and once it does come to the boil I reduce the heat to a steady simmer and put a lid on partly ajar and I'll simmer that gently for 25 minutes. Now you might be thinking and rightly so she didn't put any garlic in well you can definitely go on ahead and put a couple of cloves of garlic in the soup however the garlic gets put in the herb sprinkle that gets sprinkled on top for each individual serve or you can sprinkle it on the whole soup and it just lifts the flavour of it it's delicious and I've got one large clove of garlic here which I'm going to chop together with a small handful of parsley and just remove those stems which is like a french persale I suppose or like when you make ozobuco and you put the gremolata on top with a lemon that's delicious actually I should never tried this with a bit of lemon in it maybe it'll be lovely. Now if you have fresh basil chop up about two tablespoons of that with this otherwise two small little teaspoons of dried basil and that gets set aside to be sprinkled on top later when it's all finished. Another ingredient that gets added with the rice is some frozen peas now if you can get fresh peas they can go in at the same time with the potatoes and the carrots sauteed in the butter but I can't get fresh peas these days so I just use frozen peas and I found this brand actually my daughter put me onto this brand they're really lovely organic green peas and after 25 minutes remove the bay leaf and the parsley sprigs if you can find them and now into this goes the beans the rice the bacon which was quite crispy now and a really big cup full of frozen peas and I'm going to bring this back to the boil and when it comes back to the boil I just reduce the heat and maintain a steady simmer for about you know up to 20-25 minutes just until the rice is cooked and that might only take 15 minutes depending on the rice you're using and I'll simmer that uncovered so that actually has had 25 minutes I have my tasting spoons ready and it smells beautiful and now it's a time to taste it for seasoning oh yeah I love this soup I think the seasoning's actually spot on except now please don't judge me for this one but just a teaspoon of sugar just to take that edge off the tomatoes but that's all just one teaspoon you know you don't have to do that that's just me it's lovely and thick and just full of goodness smells beautiful a nice big bowl full and then just a little bit of the herb mixture on top and then a little grating of any cheese you like I've got some pecorino here for me one of the hardest challenges with having a YouTube channel is knowing what to post next what do people want to see you know what recipes should I make however sometimes I just make what I feel like eating and this is one of them you know this year already I think I've made this six times or more even in summer because it is fabulous meal prep after work I just get home and heat up a bowl and if I've got any cheese I sprinkle it on top and I've got a delicious meal which is highly nutritious as well and you know this will last five days in your refrigerator and it freezes very well I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do and thank you so much for watching and hopefully I'll see you again soon