Ribollita | How to Make Tuscan Bread Soup | Food Wishes

This very hearty ribollita, or Tuscan bread soup, is so thick, it’s debatable whether it’s even actually a soup, but one thing no one can argue about is how delicious, and satisfying this rustic recipe really is. Toasted garlic bread is simmered with tomato, cannellini beans, and lots of kale, and for me, this is the epitome of Italian comfort food. Enjoy!

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[Music] Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with rebelita. That’s right. There are many, many ways to make this tuskcin bread soup. And this is my way, which I think is a really good way and a very, very thick way. In fact, we’re going to make this so thick and hearty, it might not even be a soup anymore. But anyway, we’ll get to that. For now, let’s go ahead and get started by making some garlic oil, which I’m going to do by smashing some garlic and a little bit of salt in this mortar. And if you don’t have one of these, you can just use the back of a fork and smash the garlic in a bowl. And after that’s been bashed up a bit, I’m going to add some olive oil in. And then what we’ll do is give that a stir with our pestl for about 30 seconds or so. At which point, our garlic oil is going to be ready for our tor, which will be the next thing we do. And what I’ll be ripping apart today is an entire loaf of Italian chabatada bread. Although any kind of crusty French or Italian bread will work here. And what we’ll do is tear this into relatively large, very jagged chunks. And once that’s been torn up and spread out on a parchment line sheet pan, we will spoon, drizzle, and pour our garlic oil over the top. And then we’ll use our hands to give this a nice tossing. And I should mention this is an optional step and not a traditional step, right? But the soup is usually made with just stale bread, but I love what happens to the taste and the texture if we infuse the bread with garlic oil and toast it first, which after spreading that out into a nice even layer, we will do at 300° for about 30 minutes or so, or until the bread’s pretty much dried out and starting to toast. And while this doesn’t look super crunchy, the edges definitely are. And once that’s cooled down, it should probably sound like this. And once our bread is set, there’s one other thing I like to prep, which would be to add one can of drained canolini beans into a mixing bowl. And then we’ll take a potato masher and we will smash and mash these until they’re fairly smooth. At which point, we’ll add a can of whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes and we’ll use the masher to smash those in and break them up. And we can smash that as smooth or coarse as we want. Right. Personally, I like this mixture very smooth. And by the way, we’re going to use two cans of beans, but for the optimum texture, I like one of them to be smashed and one of them to remain whole. And that’s it. Once our bread is prepped and our smashed tomato bean bowl has been done, we can go ahead and start cooking our soup. And that’ll begin by adding some celery, carrots, and onions, and a nice big pinch of salt into a soup pot in which we’ve drizzled some olive oil. And what we’ll do is sauté this for about 3 or 4 minutes over mediumigh heat until those onions start to soften up and turn translucent. And how exactly long that takes is going to depend on how small you cut your veggies. But once our mixtures looking something like this, we will stop and we’ll toss in the next set of ingredients, which will include some finely minced garlic, as well as some dry oregano, some dried thyme, some dried rosemary, as well as one bay leaf. And we’ll go ahead and stir that in and sauté this for about 1 minute before we add in our chicken broth, which can of course be vegetable broth. Or if times are tough, just plain water, but I do prefer the chicken broth. Oh, and speaking of water, let’s take a nice big splash and rinse out that can the tomatoes came in. And we’ll add that in as well. And then besides giving this a stir, what we’ll do is raise our heat to high and bring this up to a simmer, at which point we’ll reduce it down to medium low. And we’ll let that cook for about 10 minutes or so, just to make sure our veggies are beautifully soft and sweet. And once we feel like that’s happened, we can raise our heat back up to high. Since we want this mixture simmering when we toss in our greens. And since this is a tuskcin soup, I thought tuskcen kale would be a great choice, as would any kind of kale or swiss chard or collarded greens or mustard greens or I’ve even seen dandelions used. Oh yeah, you could probably harvest some right in your yard. But anyway, no matter what you use, we’ll stir those in. And we’ll let this cook for about 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally. And we’ll do that to give these greens a little bit of a head start getting tender before we add the next set of ingredients. And kale gets tender pretty quick. But if you’re using something like a collar green, it might take a little longer. So you might have to adjust your cooking time. But that’s okay. That is just you cooking. But anyway, once my kale simmered for about five or six minutes, I went ahead and tossed in some finely chopped Italian parsley, followed by the other can of unsmashed beans, we’ll also want to toss in some freshly ground black pepper, plus a few shakes of cayenne just to stay in shape. And then we’ll also grab our tomato bean bowl and we’ll transfer that in. And then, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but we’ll take another splash of water or broth and we’ll rinse that bowl out. Oh yeah. If you want to be an honorary Italian grandma, we always want to rinse bowls and cans out with water and add that to whatever we’re cooking. And then what we’ll do is give that a stir. And then we’ll go grab our toasted garlicky bread chunks. And we will add in about half the loaf and stir all that together. And I’m also at this point going to add another generous addition of salt since really the only way to mess this soup up would be to undersseason it. And what our plan here is is to simmer this for about 15 minutes or until that bread collapses into the soup and our greens are tender. And once we’re back to a decent simmer, we can reduce our heat to medium probably. Oh, and classically, it would be very common to throw a piece of parmesan rind in, which I don’t have, but I do have parmesan. So, I’m going to go ahead and toss a handful in here to basically get the same effect, or at least something close. And that’s it. After letting our soup simmer for about 15 minutes or so, it’s probably going to look something like this. And once it does, we’ll grab a spoon and check for a couple things. Okay, first we want to make sure our greens are tender enough. And mine were. And then we also, of course, want to taste for seasoning and maybe add some more salt if needed. And since mine was tasting just about perfect, we can move into final production, which for me involves stirring in about 3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, which is going to provide some much needed acidity. And we could do the same thing with some lemon, which I’ll use instead of the vinegar once in a while, but it depends on my mood. And that’s it. At this point, our soup is basically done. So, what we’ll do is turn off the heat and we’ll add half of the remaining toasted bread chunks. And we’ll sort of poke those in. And if you don’t happen to be into super thick soups, you can simply use less bread. I mean, you are after all this senor and senorita of your ribbalita. And you could do this with half the amount of bread and get something a lot soupier. And that’s it. We’ll go ahead and pull that off the heat and add a few finishing touches to the top, which for me will include another grating of cheese, followed by another scattering of Italian parsley. And then I know we did a little bit of cayenne, but I think we still want a nice scattering of red chili flakes over the top. And then since the celery stocks I chopped up have these beautiful leaves on top, I decided to place some over since I always love an excuse to use a little chartreuse. And that’s it. We’ll finish up with a very, very generous drizzle of olive oil. And my extra thick, super hearty Tuscan bread soup is ready to enjoy. And as I grab a ladle to serve this up, you can see what I mean about this maybe not even being a soup anymore. I mean, that is thick. But I will say as I grab a bowl and serve some up, it’s not quite as thick as it looks because what appear to be solid chunks of bread are really like 90% liquid. So the mouth feel of this is way more soupy than the appearance. Oh, and once you ladle this up, we’ll take the remaining toasted bread and we’ll use that to garnish the top with, of course, some more cheese, olive oil, and parsley. And that, my friends, to me, is the epitome of rustic Italian comfort food. And no matter what’s going on in your life, there is no way you don’t feel better after eating this, or at the very least, much fuller. And yes, some people don’t add any bread in until we serve the soup. And other folks add all the bread in before we serve the soup. But I think cooking half in and then adding some more at the end here is the way to go. At least in terms of textural diversity. And of course, I don’t need to tell you if you have some extra veggies from the garden or already in the fridge cooked, feel free to add those in. All right, along with a way to use up stale bread. That’s pretty much the reason this soup was invented. But whether you tweak the ingredients or make this as shown, it’s one of the world’s heartiest and most satisfying soups. which is why I really do hope you give this a try soon. So, please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts, a printable written recipe, and much more info as usual. And is always in joy.