Minestrone Soup: Easy Soup Recipe

Each country has soups linked to its cuisine, and they reflect the traditional ingredients that each country uses in its cooking. One of the best known Italian soups is minestrone soup.

Minestrone soup is a hearty and nutritious meal that is full of the flavours of the Mediterranean. There are many ways to make this soup, and each Italian family has their own recipe. You can use all types of vegetables in this popular Italian soup depending on their seasonal availability, as there are no strict rules.

One ingredient that differentiates minestrone from other vegetable soups is pasta. You can use any variety of pasta you wish. Usually, I use either snapped spaghetti or penne, just because that is what I typically have in my cupboard. However, any small pasta variety is acceptable, and it is up to you whether you use regular or wholemeal pasta.

The following recipe for minestrone soup is easy to make, and you can adapt it to suit your own tastes by interchanging ingredients. We have included some additional tips after the recipe to help you make this soup suit the tastes of you and your family.

Here is a simple and tasty minestrone soup recipe.

Preparation time:	15 minutes
Cooking time:	1 hour
Servings:	8
Vegetarian/ vegan:	NO (see additional tips)
Dairy-free:	NO (see additional tips)
Gluten-free:	NO (see additional tips)

Ingredients for Minestrone Soup

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 carrots, finely diced
• 1 courgette, diced
• 2 sticks celery, finely diced
• 1 small leek, trimmed and thinly sliced
• 1 large potato, peeled and diced
• A handful of savoy cabbage or curly kale, chopped
• 2 rashers smoked streaky bacon
• 100g (dry weight) pasta shapes or spaghetti
• 1 cup of green beans, trimmed and sliced into 1-inch pieces
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 litre of vegetable stock
• 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
• 400g tin of cannellini beans
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp dried basil
• A bay leaf
• Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• Parmesan cheese to garnish

How to Make Minestrone Soup

1. Cut the leek into quarters lengthways, then thinly slice.
2. Peel the carrots and then dice the carrots, the sticks of celery, and the courgette.
3. Peel and chop the onion and crush the garlic.
4. Trim the beans and slice into one-inch pieces.
5. Cut the rashers of streaky bacon into pieces.
6. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.
7. Add the bacon to the oil and cook for a few minutes until the bacon fat is beginning to turn golden.
8. Add the celery, carrot, onion, courgette, leeks, onion, garlic, and bay leaf to the pan, then cook for approximately 15 minutes until the vegetables are beginning to soften. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking and to ensure even cooking.
9. Next, add the tin of chopped tomatoes, the cannellini beans, the potatoes, the tomato puree, and the herbs. Stir the ingredients together and press the tomatoes with the back of a spoon to break them up.
10. Cover the mixture with the vegetable stock, put a lid on the pan, and bring to the boil.
11. Reduce the heat so that the soup is simmering and cook for a further 20 minutes.
12. Check that the potato has softened by piercing a piece of potato with a fork.
13. If the potato is soft, add the pasta, the green beans, and the cabbage or kale.
14. Season the soup with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.
15. Cook for a further 10 minutes until the pasta is al dente, which means that the pasta is soft but still has some bite.
16. Remove the bay leaf from the soup, then serve the minestrone soup into bowls, and add some shavings of fresh Parmesan cheese.

Additional Tips

• You can replace any of the vegetable items with other vegetables of your choice.
• If you do not have cannellini beans, you can use haricot or black-eyed beans instead.
• You might also like our three bean and chorizo soup recipe.
• Minestra d’orzo is another soup you may like, but it contains barley instead of pasta. A further soup recipe you may enjoy is vegetable mulligatawny, which is an Indian soup with vegetables, spices, and rice.
• Reduce or increase the amount of garlic to suit your tastes.
• If you follow a dairy-free diet, then you can omit the Parmesan shavings from this recipe.
• Omit the bacon rashers if you are vegetarian or vegan to make a flavoursome vegetable soup.
• Those on a gluten-free diet should omit the pasta and not serve the minestrone soup with croutons or bread.
• If you have fresh basil and oregano, then use these instead of the dried herbs.
• Serve this soup with croutons or your choice of bread. It is particularly delicious with garlic bread made from slices of baguette.
• If you prefer, you can cook the pasta in a separate pan, then add the pasta to the minestrone soup just before serving.
• You might like to try our recipe for zupa pomidorowa, a Polish tomato and pasta soup.