How to Make Delicious Italian Wedding Soup

Sharing how to make the most delicious Italian wedding soup with sweet & spicy Italian sausage meatballs, bites of pasta and vegetables, and a flavorful stock. I didn’t grow up as a massive fan of this soup, so I was excited to make a version I really loved. And this hit all the marks! My family loves it, and I hope yours does too. 🙂

RECIPE: https://asimplepalate.com/blog/italian-wedding-soup/

INGREDIENTS
Meatballs
1/2 lb spicy Italian sausage, pork or chicken sausage works
1/2 lb sweet Italian sausage, pork or chicken sausage works
3 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
1/2 cup finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano, or Pecorino Romano
1/2 cup soft breadcrumbs
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1/2 teaspoon kosher sea salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 egg
The Soup
5 Tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 medium to large diced yellow onion,
2 diced medium to large carrots
2 diced celery ribs
3 large garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup dry white wine, I used Pinot Grigio
8 cups chicken stock
1 fresh rosemary sprig
1 medium to large Parmigiano Reggiano rind
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/3 cup dry acini de pepe
salt and black pepper to taste
3 cups chopped escarole or spinach

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EQUIPMENT USED IN THIS VIDEO
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Chef Knife – https://amzn.to/4pviwjy
Cutting Board (similar) – https://amzn.to/49TSaTj

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Hey everyone, welcome to my kitchen. I’m Bethany and today’s recipe I’m going to be showing you how to make a delicious and comforting Italian wedding soup. There’s a couple different ways in which you can make an Italian wedding soup. This is just my way of making it and so I’m excited to share it with you. So, let’s get right into it. Okay, so the first thing that we want to do is make our meatballs for our Italian wedding soup, which is actually what makes this soup so special [music] is it’s filled with little tiny meatballs. And we’re going to flavor them really nicely. So, first I’m going to chop up about 1/4 cup of flat leaf parsley. I’m going to chop this up really small because the meatballs themselves are going to be smaller and I don’t want them to have big pieces of herbs in them. And then I’m going to just add that to a big bowl that we have to mix all our meatball ingredients in there. So next we’re going to add breadrumbs. And typically in my recipes I toast bread and then I blend it into breadcrumbs. This is actually just sandwich bread that’s untoasted. And [music] I blended that in a food processor or a blender works. You’ll just use about a slice, enough for a half a cup. And using the untoasted bread is going to give our meatball a little bit more moisture because the bread is nice and soft and has moisture. And then we have a half a cup of finely grated primaro. You can also use pecorino romano. A lot of people like to use that instead cuz it has a more pungent flavor. Then an egg. Then three garlic cloves either finely minced or pressed. and a half a teaspoon of kosher salt and then 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper. And typically I like to add other secret ingredients that you might have seen in other videos in my Italian meatball video uh to make these more moist, but since this is in a soup, I don’t really want them to be so tender cuz they might fall apart. These are going to be delicious without those ingredients. So for the meat, you can do a lot of different options here. What I’m doing is a half a pound of mild or sweet Italian sausage. This is actually chicken sausage, but I’ve used pork as well. And then a half a pound of spicy Italian sausage. I like the blend of a little bit of spicy, a little bit of sweet. It gives a nice balance rather than just doing a spicy, which might be too spicy, or a sweet that could be a little bit too mild in flavor. But there’s a couple things that you can do. You can do all sausage or you could do half a pound of ground beef and a half a pound of sausage. Uh but I like using sausage cuz it has a [music] little bit more flavor. Uh and I’m using chicken. Make it a little bit healthier. But I’ve done this with pork sausage. I’ve also done this with ground chicken. Now, if you use anything [music] other than sausage, what I recommend doing is adding a half a teaspoon of fennel seeds to this because then that’s going to give it a nice flavoring because the sausage has fennel in it and different seasonings to give it a little bit more flavor. But we’ll mix the sausage and the ingredients together just until they’re combined. Okay, so now I’m going to get a sheet pan out. I’ll line it with parchment paper and we’ll get ready to roll these. So, we have our sheetpan lined with parchment paper and we’re going to measure out a really tiny [music] meatball. So, about an inch. You could even go a little bit smaller than that. That’s just because we want these to be a nice bite size for the soup. And you want these meatballs just a little bit tighter. We don’t want a lot of cracks because we don’t want them to split open and fall apart while they’re simmering in the soup. So, just about an inch. Honestly, you could go smaller, but I don’t want a ton of tiny meatballs to have to sear in a pan. So, I like to make them just a little bit bigger. And we’ll just continue this until we use up all of our chicken. [music] And I know that this recipe is a little bit more timeconuming because of making these meatballs. So, if you like Italian wedding soup [music] and you want to skip having to make this the next time, you can double up on your mixture for the meatballs. And then just freeze these. You can freeze them raw. Um, I like to freeze them first on a sheet pan and then throw them in a ziploc bag. And that way you can just plop them into your soup or defrost them in the fridge and then brown them in a pan so you already have them made and you don’t have to make them again the next time you [music] make this soup. Okay, so the next step with our meatballs is we want to brown them. I like to have a little bit of color, not too much with the meatballs. Some people like to just put them in raw and you can totally do that. Uh, but I think that they could have a nice color on them and could help with the flavor. So, I have a big saucepan here. I have that already heated up and I’m going to put in about 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil. I’m going to place them in one by one. And they’re only going to cook for 1 to 2 minutes per side. We’re not really browning them like regular meatballs. Just getting a little bit of color. I would much rather dump this whole tray in here, but I don’t want them to all fall on top of each other. So, just placing them in here one by one. All right, so the first one that I put in there, I’m already flipping that one. It has just the slightest bit of browning on it. That’s what I want. We don’t want our pan blazing hot. Just an ever so slightly browning of the meatball. All right. So, these have only been in here for like 3 minutes. Now, we’re going to remove them. They have a beautiful color on them, and they smell wonderful. So, we’re going to take them out, transfer them to a bowl lined with some paper towels to sap up the oil. So, now we’re going to set these aside, and we’ll get the rest of our soup going. Okay. So, for the base of our soup, we’re going to do a typical sophrito. So, we’re going to do onion, a medium sized onion, and then carrots and celery. And Italian wedding soup, it has nothing to do with weddings. It’s basically the marriage of the ingredients together. So, it’s the meatballs, it’s the vegetables, and [music] some other ingredients I’m going to use, but they all taste harmonious together. And we’ll dice our onion up. Then we’ll need about two carrots, but mine are my garden carrots, and they are very tiny. So, I’m going to use a couple of these to equal what I think would be two medium carrots. We’ll dice these up nice and small. These carrots are so sweet. They are from my winter harvest or fall harvest that I just had. Uh, they were actually frozen in my raised beds because I don’t think I picked them in time because I’m [music] gardening for the first year. So, but they are so sweet. They’re sweeter than my summer carrots. So, I’ve been loving using these in recipes. And then we’re going to do two celery ribs. I know I’ve been saying celery stalks in all my videos and somebody corrected me and said they’re celery ribs. A whole stock is the whole thing. So, apologies for not saying that correctly. This is a celery rib, but we’ll finally dice these up. I like small pieces for soups, especially one like this. You want the meatballs to shine. You don’t want big chunks of vegetables all in there. Okay. All right. So, now I have a big [music] Dutch oven pot heating up. This is a seven quart. I’ve been asked about the sizes of my pots. This one’s a seven quart. And we’ll put about 2 tablebspoon of olive oil down. And we’re going to put all our safo in there. So, our onion and the carrots and celery. [music] Okay. Then we’ll put generous pinch of salt over top of that. We always season every layer, especially when making a soup. And we’ll stir that up. We’ll cook these for a few minutes, just until they’re soft, not browning. And I’ll put another little pinch of salt in there. All right. So, our vegetables are pretty much done. So, they’re nice and soft, which is what we want. And I’m going to add three big garlic cloves. So, these are a bit larger, which I don’t mind. I like a lot of garlic. So, I’m going to press these in. You can mince them. I’d mince them really small if you’re doing it by knife. Stir that in with our vegetables for 30 seconds to a minute. So, generally there’s not a lot of herbs other than parsley and the meatballs in an Italian wedding soup, but I always like to toss in a rosemary sprig when I can. I think it adds a lot to this recipe. So, we’re doing one fresh rosemary sprig right into the pot. You can do dried rosemary, too, but this is just really nice cuz the sprig really infuses a lot of rosemary flavor. Then we’re going to do a/4 cup of dry white wine. I’m using pog grigio. It’s just like a generous splash. And this is going to really add a beautiful flavor to this soup. It’s not really traditional, but I think it is so good. Then we have our meatballs that we browned earlier. So, I’m just going to toss the meatballs a little bit in that white wine with the vegetables. And honestly, I could have totally gone smaller with the meatballs, but I am so used to making bigger ones that those seemed small to me, but they could have been even smaller. Okay, so next we’re going to add eight cups of chicken stock. And if you’re using storebought chicken stock, that would just be two 32 oz cartons of that. This soup needs a little bit more stock because we’re adding pasta. And that’s going to absorb a good bit of our liquid. And then to season a little bit more, we’re going to layer with 1/4 teaspoon each of garlic powder and onion powder. If you’re familiar with my recipes, then you know I like to layer a little bit more garlic and onion in a dried form because it gives more concentrated flavor. And then we have a nice big parmesan reaniano rind that’s going to infuse lots of amazing flavor into the soup. Generous pinch of salt. We’ll season more at the end. And then a generous pinch of black pepper. All right. And then we have our pasta which is achini de pepe. And this is just a tiny little peppercornsiz pasta. You could also do pastina, but this is the traditional pasta for Italian wedding soup. And we’re going to do 1/3 cup. Like I said, this is going to absorb a good bit of the stock, but I’m not using that much pasta. I personally don’t like a ton of the achini de pepe in this. I’ve tested this with half a cup and I felt like it was too much pasta. I like to have a good balance of everything. So, if you like a little bit more pasta, you could do half a cup, but I think a third cup is just right. So, now we’re going to let this cook for about 20 25 minutes. And I’ll cover it partially. And then towards the end of our cooking time, we’re going to add our greens to the dish. Okay. So, our soup has been cooking for about 25 minutes. The pasta is cooked now. And our last ingredient is going to be greens. So, we have a head of escrow here. This is very common in a Italian wedding soup. Uh but you can also use kale or spinach, um arugula, whatever you like, but it’s common to have a nice green in there. So I’m going to use about 2 to three cups of escarole. I actually when I make this, I like to uh mix half spinach, half escarole. So you can do that. You can really add whatever greens you like to this. still had the soup on a low simmer and we’ll put our escirl in there. So, I actually have spinach in my fridge and I thought why not? We’ll just throw a nice handful of this in there as well cuz like I said, I like to do half spinach, half escarole. Just chop this up. You can throw them whole in, but I just like them into small pieces. Makes it easier to eat. All right. So, before we do our official tasting, I just want to taste the broth. We’ll probably need a little bit more salt. Okay. Tastes delicious, but definitely another generous pinch of salt. Stir that in there. Still a little bit more great flavor, but that salt is going to really draw more flavor. Okay, perfect. Delicious. So, now we can do an official taste testing with our taste tester. >> All right, Drew is here to taste. Welcome. Hi. >> Thanks so much. I’m really excited to have this. We’ve been having this uh a bunch this week. It’s really really good. Excited [music] to have it. >> Yeah. All the the taste testing that I’ve had to do. >> It’s so good. >> But we’re going to serve this with some Parmesan Reo on top, of course. Now we can taste it. >> What’s interesting about the soup is I like [music] whenever you you’re at like a soup bar and you see Italian wedding soup, I would always pass it. I would never want that soup for some reason. But this version is the bomb. It’s incredible. I love the flavors in this and I I would have this all the time. >> It’s so delicious. It’s comforting and the meatballs are so flavorful. >> Yeah, they are. >> And they’re not they’re not too big. It’s manageable. You just cut them up a little bit and they’re good. >> I have tested this a number of different ways. I did this with the ground chicken and then you actually were like, I like that. You don’t need to take test [music] it any other way. >> I think this is the perfect balance. Half a pound of spicy, half a pound of sweet. You get just a slight kick of the heat, but to me it just has more flavor and >> yeah, >> delicious. And you have the white wine. I feel like that adds a really nice depth of flavor. Yeah. >> Um, but this would go so good with sourdough bread. We have Drew sourdough recipe on the YouTube channel on the website. We also have a rosemary garlic bread. If you don’t want to get super involved with bread, the rosemary garlic bread is so easy. It takes like 3 hours. Really great bread to make. So, yeah. Or some homemade pizza. Um, but yeah, >> that’d be good. >> Yeah. Well, that’s everything. So, I hope you guys enjoy this version of Italian wedding soup. Lots of different ways that you could make it, but this is just my way. And so, I hope you enjoy it. And as always, we appreciate the support, the comments, everything. And we’ll catch you in the next recipe. And I’ll see you in the comments.