Simply minestrone

A minestrone is the ideal dish at the beginning of the year: it warms and nourishes. It is easy to prepare. Its numerous variations offer something for every taste preference, whether you’re a meat lover or vegan.

While the vegetables clearly play the main role in minestrone, beans, rice, bread or pasta can be added according to taste to make the soup creamier and more filling. The regions of Italy have certain preferences for one ingredient or another. To each his or her own.

The day before

For all bean lovers, the preparation of the minestrone starts the day before if you want to use dried beans. Soak the white beans in water in a pan with the addition of sage leaves.

In the meantime, it’s worth making a trip to the farmers’ market to see what nature has to offer. In the winter months, this could be carrots, onions, leeks, celery, savoy cabbage, black cabbage and parsley roots.

Chop for all you’re worth

A good large chopping board, a perfectly sharpened knife and good music. While it’s raining or snowing outside at the weekend, a good minestrone is created in the kitchen, portions of which can be frozen later and are therefore perfectly prepared for the next week when things need to be done quickly again.

A good cook uses everything for minestrone: the peel, stalks, ends and hard stalks of the vegetables are used to make a vegetable stock with water, juniper berries, bay leaf and pepper. We love it when there is no food waste and everything can be used.

Once the rest of the vegetables have been cut into pieces, we come to the fork in the road that separates meat lovers and vegetarians: for the meat version, slices of pancetta are first roasted in a large soup pot and then the first vegetables are tossed in it, while vegetarians simply sauté the vegetables in olive oil or butter.

Colorful sequence

The order in which the vegetables are added depends on their cooking time. Rather hard vegetables such as carrots, celery and other root vegetables that tolerate roasting flavors are added to the soup pot first. Soft vegetables follow later. Peas, fresh spinach leaves or other soft vegetables such as zucchinis are added at the very end.

The vegetables are infused with stock so that they have enough liquid but are not necessarily drowned in it.

Friends of Italian cuisine always have one or more pieces of Parmesan in the house. The rind of the Parmesan may be added to the broth and then removed. A bunch of herbs that you have on hand will also give the minestrone a special flavor. Thyme, marjoram, basil and rosemary, for example, go well.

Purists or mixologists

Opinions differ again towards the end of the cooking time. Bean lovers are happy to add the white beans, soaked the day before and now cooked in a separate pot, to the minestrone.

Other groups cook rice separately and add it to the minestrone or, towards the end of the cooking time, leave small pasta to steep al dente in the minestrone. In Tuscany, people like minestrone with bread. In Liguria, people love minestrone with a generous spoonful of pesto genovese, which is stirred into the soup at the very end.

As you cook the beans, rice and perhaps also the pasta separately, everyone can be happy with their preferred minestrone mix.

The same applies to the type of stock. Vegetable lovers stick to vegetable stock, others add chicken or beef stock to the minestrone.

You can expect everyone to be happy when you put a bowl of freshly grated Parmesan cheese on the table. A full-bodied red wine from Tuscany would be just as enjoyable after the Dry January.

Minestrone at star level

Milan has a lot to offer in terms of cuisine. The best time to visit the city is in the low season, excluding the major fashion fairs. Because on these days, eager assistants have completely reserved the tables in the most popular restaurants for their superiors, their customers and multipliers, so that only regular guests have the chance to spontaneously book a table.

If the trade fair visitors and summer tourists are not on site, there are many places to feast, such as the Il Luogo restaurant. One of the two chefs, Alessandro Negrini, captured the cooking of a delicious Etruscan-style minestrone on video. Watching it being prepared is already a great pleasure.

His way of preparing soup is a little more time-consuming, but can still be cooked by any beginner. Rare for a star-level recipe. Enjoy the video and draw inspiration from it for your own personal minestrone.

In epicurean Milan, a delicatessen like Peck can also enjoy excellent business. Opened in 1883 by Francesco Peck, a Metz native from Prague, locals and tourists still flock to Peck‘s halls today. We were there too and enjoyed a nutritious minestrone in the bistro there. They serve it with tomatoes. Viva Italia.

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