Rustic and Hearty Minestrone Soup

This Italian classic, minestrone soup, has been one of my favorites all my life. This recipe is the result of a decade of tinkering. When I make this, leftovers don’t last for very long.

Try it with my Parmesan cheese toast for the best dunking experience!

Amazing Parmesan Garlic Toast – Home Pressure Cooking

Ingredients

• 1 pound Italian Sausage
• 1 can Red Kidney Beans (Drained and Rinsed)
• 1/2 cup Ditalini Pasta (Any small pasta noodle will do, a small macaroni or shell is a fine substitute.)
• 2 medium carrots chopped
• 3 ribs celery, chopped
• 1 Yellow Bell Pepper chopped
• 5 Fresh Plum Tomato’s chopped and de-seeded (or 1 can of diced tomatoes)
• 5 cloves Fresh Garlic sliced into “chips”
• 22 oz V8 Tomato Juice
• 1/2 cup Chicken Broth
• 1 tbsp. Dry Oregano
• 1 tsp. Fennel Seed
• 1/2 tsp Dry Thyme

Browning The Sausage

This recipe has always been delicious, but when I modified the way I brown the sausage; it truly became something special.

Normally, you would crumble the sausage up and cook it through. While cooking it this way, the sausage releases loads of juices and water, and it essentially boils. While that’s fine, you don’t get any true browning.

I decided to try something new. I started adding the sausage like it was one big patty and found that getting real color on it to flavor the soup as a whole really leveled up the dish!

So let’s get started!

Grab a soup pot, and place it on medium-high heat and get it ripping hot, then add your sausage.

You can see I’m using loose sausage, if you have regular links, just remove the casings, and as long as it’s not crumbled you should get good results!

Let the sausage cook until you have good color on both sides, then use a spatula or wooden spoon to break it up and let it finish cooking. You don’t want it to cook all the way through before doing this as it will be difficult to break it up.

Once it’s broken into acceptable bite-sized pieces, add all your chopped vegetables.

Let everything cook until the sausage is done through and the vegetables begin to release their water, then reduce heat to medium.

Next:

add the tomato juice and chicken broth along with the dry herbs and fresh garlic chips to the pot.

Put a lid on the pot and bring to a gentle simmer, once it’s simmering offset the lid so some steam can escape.

This will allow the broth to reduce and concentrate flavors.

Simmer

After 40 minutes of simmering, add the pasta and then continue simmering until the pasta is cooked through.

Once the pasta is cooked, add the kidney beans and stir them in. Adding the kidney beans sooner than this can result in the beans breaking up and losing their skins.

Now, you’re ready to serve!

I recommend topping the soup with some shredded Romano, or Parmesan cheese. A cheap readily available garnish is some celery leaves that come free with celery!

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