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Uncle Scott's Kitchen shows how to make ribollita, maybe the best soup ever. It's a hearty and healthy Italian vegetable soup, perfect for a cold winter day. It's authentic Tuscan cooking, genuine Italian soup, full of healthy ingredients like kale, savoy cabbage, vegetables, cannellini beans and more. Recipe below.
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RIBOLLITA RECIPE WITH STEPS
Step One: Soak Your Beans
Soak your beans in salt water the day before you want to cook them. Dissolve three tablespoons of salt in one gallon of water, add your beans, stir, cover and leave them overnight.
Step Two: Drain and Rinse
Drain and rinse the beans. Discard the soaking liquid. Wash the pot.
Add 8-12 cups of water back to the pot. Rinse the beans really well and drain them, then add them back to the pot.
You want the beans to be covered by at least two inches of water.
Step Three: Cook the Beans
Bring up to a boil. Add a half teaspoon of salt to your water.
Boil partially covered for 45 minutes.
If your beans are creating lots of foam, you can reduce your boil a little and/or skim off the foam.
After 45 minutes, start checking a test bean every five minutes or so. If, after 45 minutes, the beans are still really hard, you can add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to the water.
Boil until they are tender but not mushy and exploded. Check them regularly.
When done, leave them covered and remove the pot from the heat.
DO NOT DRAIN THEM. Retain all the cooking water.
Step Four: Prepare Soffritto
As the beans boil, you have at least 45 minutes of free time.
In this time, you need to wash, peel, and chop three carrots, three or four celery hearts, and an onion, roughly the same amounts of each.
These will be our soffrito. We’ll sweat and slowly cook these in olive oil once the beans are done.
Step Five: Slice Your Bread
We’re still in the 45 minute bean cooking window. Go ahead and cut up your bread into thin slices. Put these on a wire rack on a baking sheet and put in a warm oven and dry them until they are slightly crunchy. Don’t toast them or turn them brown.
Step Six: Cook the Soffritto
Once the beans are done, remove them from the heat and set them aside, covered, and do not drain.
To your second dutch oven add one half-cup of good extra virgin olive oil and bring it up to heat on a low flame.
Add your soffrito veggies. Low and slow is the way to go. We do NOT want to brown these veggies. Sweat them and soften them. Use low heat so that they are only barely sizzling. Stir often.
They are ready when they are soft, sweet and almost buttery.
Step Seven: Puree’ Half of the Beans.
Take half the beans out of the pot, along with some of the cooking water to cover them and keep them from drying out, and set them aside.
Use a hand-held mixer and blend everything up until smooth. .
Now add the remaining whole beans and water back to the pot.
Step Eight: Prepare Potatoes and Tomatoes
Peel and cube the two russet potatoes in 3/4 inch cubes. Get your tomato ready, either canned and cut, real or paste. The more you add, the redder the soup will be.
Step Nine: Combine Everything So Far
Return the bean pot to boiling. Add your potatoes, soffritto, tomato and stir well.
Step 10: Prepare and Add Kale and Cabbage
Clean the kale, remove the tough middle rib and chop. For the savoy, remove the tough middle and chop.
Add them up to the rim of the pot.
Step 11: Adjust and Cook
Add water and salt and pepper if needed. Stir often, so that the soup doesn’t stick. Cook 45 minutes until the cabbage is tender.
Step 12: Prepare Your Bread Pot and Add the Soup
In the bottom of a dutch oven, add a little olive oil.
Line the bottom with a layer of dry, crunchy bread. Drizzle a little olive oil on the bread.
On top of this, ladle in a layer of soup. Repeat, alternating layers of bread and soup.
Now cover this pot. Let it cool for a couple of hours, then refrigerate.
Step 13: Reboil
It's day three, and our bread soup has rested overnight, its flavors have come together, and now it’s time to reboil it..
Remove the dutch oven from the fridge. The soup is very thick, and may not have any liquid at all.
It can be difficult to reheat the entire dutch oven at once. If you do, add water and heat it very slowly, as it can scorch.
A better way: remove several portions of soup, add them to a little water and oil in a sauce pan, and bring the mixture up to a boil.
When it bubbles, it’s reboiled, and you have officially made an authentic real deal ribollita.
Enjoy!