♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Italian cooking arguably is the most popular cuisine in the world.

They even have Italian restaurants in Tokyo, as I recently found out.

So soups are part of that repertoire.

And here are three Italian soups we absolutely love.

The first is an Italian wedding soup.

We actually went to Italy to learn how to make it and they don't fill it with little mini meatballs, by the way.

And in Tuscany, we have two bread soups.

We have acquacotta, and this is "cooked water."

It's a tomato-based soup, has tons of flavor, obviously, with some bread in it and also poached eggs.

And finally, ribollita, which you've probably heard of and made, a white bean vegetable soup, and we'll do our best to make the best ribollita you've ever had.

So please stay tuned as we make three of our favorite Italian soups.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Conventional wisdom is that Italian wedding soup, or minestra maritata, is not named for when it is served, but rather for the marriage of ingredients that occurs in the pot.

This is true, but it's also not true.

Because while it is named for the marriage of ingredients, it also very much is served at Italian weddings.

Now, I learned all this when I visited the farm of Antonietta di Gruttola about an hour outside of Naples.

♪ ♪ - (speaking Italian): ♪ ♪ MAN: DI GRUTTOLA: - So I loved Antonietta's version of Italian wedding soup, but to be honest, I wasn't sure we were going to be able to replicate it back in the United States.

It relied so heavily on herbs and wild greens that we harvested in her yard.

So I headed back to Naples, where I could visit my favorite restaurant, Tavernetta Vittozzi, where I knew that the five Vittozzi sisters would teach me an amazing version of this soup.

♪ ♪ - (speaking Italian): - The biggest difference between true Italian wedding soup and Italian American wedding soup is, well, there's no meatballs, for one thing, and there's also no pasta.

This is actually a recipe that dates way back in Italian culinary history and originates with cucina povera.

And that's why in Italy, minestra maritata is more about the greens and the broth than it is about the meat.

The core of a great Italian wedding soup is the broth.

And we start by building a lot of flavor early on.

We sauté some pancetta with some olive oil to extract tons of fat and, let's face it, flavor from that fat.

And then you add a classic Italian soffritto and you cook that in-- it just creates this wonderful sweet and savory push-pull that creates a base of a wonderful, wonderful broth that we're going to be able to build up so much more flavor in as the meat cooks in it.

Antonietta explained to me that which meat is used in Italian wedding soup depends on when you're serving it.

For an everyday version, chicken is quite common.

And frankly, that's what she often did, and that's what she made for me, but for special occasions, beef and pork are more common.

And in fact, actually, they often combine them.

Now, while Antonietta's chicken version was incredibly delicious, I have to say I was wowed by the Vittozzi sisters' combination of pork and beef.

And that's kind of the direction we took.

Okay, there's our meat.

And we're going to let that cool for just a couple of minutes so that it's easy enough to handle.

And in the meantime, we're going to scoop out all our solid.

It has done its job, it's flavored our broth, and now we can send it on its way.

At Tavernetta Vittozzi, they leave the bones in the soup, which is fine.

But to make it a little bit easier for us, we take the bones out and discard those before we finish the soup.

Obviously, we can't replicate the wild greens and herbs that Antonietta harvested from her yard for her soup, so we kind of looked for some alternatives.

We settled on broccoli rabe, because it's kind of hardy enough to stand up to this really bold, flavorful broth, but you could also use escarole or any other hardy green.

In fact, kale or chard would be other great options.

What really impressed me about true Italian wedding soup is that the broth and the greens aren't afterthoughts.

They're really robust in this recipe.

You know, it's that marriage that makes the soup so wonderful.

It's not that the meat stands out, it's not that the greens stand out, it's their combination together that makes this soup so wonderful.

♪ ♪ - So, all of the soups in this episode call for water, because there's time for that water to become broth.

We're like anybody else, though, and on a Tuesday night, store-bought broth is our best friend.

However, it doesn't taste as good as homemade broth, so we have a few tips for how to boost your store-bought broth.

Number one is re-broth your broth.

So stock or bone broth is made from raw pieces of meat with bone and skin on that simmers in water for a long time.

So if you're making chicken soup and you put the bone-in, skin-on pieces of chicken in your store-bought broth, the fat from the skin and the gelatin from the bones will boost your broth.

You're going to get a richer broth with more body and better flavor.

And you need the chicken anyway for your chicken noodle soup.

So you're not adding time, you're just adding flavor.

I want to show you the difference.

So here's some chicken that's been simmering until it's ready to come out.

But look at this broth.

You can see some of the fat in there, and it's got much better body than our store-bought broth.

The second way to boost your broth is with a parmesan cheese rind.

So whether your recipe calls for parmesan or not, you're inevitably going to have leftover rinds from some recipe that does, right?

I particularly love this trick with vegetarian soup.

So this is vegetable store-bought broth, which, to be honest, is usually the worst of the batch.

But by adding the parmesan, you add beautiful flavor and body.

The fat from the rind and also the savoriness is going to make your vegetarian soups feel more substantial, be more substantial, so your vegetarian eaters are going to be happier at dinner.

The third broth booster is browning tomato paste.

So, every Italian nonna knows that if you brown tomato paste, you take something that's already concentrated and make it even more delicious.

All right, we've got a nice, curdled, disaster-looking mess.

Nice browning on the bottom of the pan.

We nailed it.

We're about to boost our broth.

So in goes store-bought chicken or vegetable broth.

Look how beautiful this is.

Add some shredded chicken, some orzo, some parsley and dill, and dinner's done.

And much better than if you started with just the box of broth.

So we've done three.

We have one more broth booster today, and that's to use a whole head of garlic.

This works across any cuisine that uses garlic, which is every cuisine.

All you have is your box of broth in the pan, and you want to cut off about the top third or so of the head of garlic, enough so that every clove is exposed.

So you put the garlic in the broth and you do want to let it simmer for at least 30 minutes.

The cloves need to be soft so that you can squeeze them out and whisk them into the broth, and actually incorporate them to add body.

The garlic does two things.

One, it adds sweetness and flavor from that whole head of garlic, but it's not aggressively garlicky, because it's had so long to simmer.

It's actually more soft and sweet.

And two, when you whisk it into the broth, you add body.

So the next time you're making soup on a weeknight, and you want to make it better than store-bought broth, try one of these four methods for boosting your broth.

♪ ♪ (people talking in background) - (speaking Italian) I was born here, in the same house where my father was born and my grandmother was born.

My elementary school was down there, so I'm, I'm very local.

(dogs barking, howling) ♪ ♪ Tuscan food is traditional.

It's very seasonal.

There are lots of plant-based recipes.

The, the basic approach is the cucina povera approach.

For example, today, we are making ribollita, and ribollita has stale bread in it.

So the traditional way of cooking the cucina povera respects the ingredients, respects leftovers, and then, according to where you are, your ingredients, you develop different recipes.

This is my grandmother's secret, tomato paste.

(pot sizzling) (pot simmering) Then you add the bread, and so it becomes thicker soup that is more filling.

And then when you re-boil the ribollita-- so, "re-boil"-- the day after, with the bread... ...you got the ribollita.

So, acquacotta comes from Maremma, and Maremma is a very poor land, because it used to be, um, marshlands until the beginning of the, uh, 20th century.

And so this recipe really represents the, how poor the land was.

That's the easiest, simplest soup, because it's called acquacotta.

So it's "cooked water."

The basic ingredients are onions, celery, and tomatoes.

The only way to gain flavor is to let it cook slowly.

So the difference is, for acquacotta, the bread is on the bottom, it's not mixed in the soup, and then we end with poached eggs in the soup and some pecorino on top.

♪ ♪ - So if you ever wondered about stock, so this recipe, acquacotta, which means "cooked water," I love it, because it's water, right?

At least initially it was, with some vegetables, and then you can throw in some bread if you like, and maybe a poached egg, but it's essentially water.

We'll add some flavorings to it, but it has some tomatoes and water.

There's no stock.

Which makes perfect sense to me, because it's so easy.

So we're going to start with a lot of oil, like most recipes in Italy do, a quarter-cup.

I'll just keep doing this for a while.

Onion, red onion, of course.

Celery.

And a little red pepper flake.

A little salt-- half-teaspoon.

So this is whole tomatoes in the juices.

You know what?

I'm just going to use my hands, because otherwise... You know, someone put this here so when I did this, it was all going to fly in my face.

It's fun working at Milk Street.

I'm just going to use my hands.

(pan sizzling loudly) Okay, so, here's a good little tip.

You heard this making a lot of noise, that sort of angry sauté noise.

It was-- the heat was too high.

So I just turned it down.

What you don't want to do, uh, is use high heat and start burning onions.

You want to be nice and gentle with it right now.

So we're just going to soften it, we're not going to brown it.

(pan sizzling softly) Now, that sounds perfect.

It's gentle.

It's not aggressive.

We're just softening the vegetables.

So that looks pretty good to me.

We'll put in the tomatoes.

By the way, in Italy, almost every time I've cooked with someone using tomatoes, they use jarred tomato purée called passata.

So they use, you know, pasta out of a box, dry pasta.

They also use canned or bottled tomatoes.

So I'm going to bring this to a boil and then I'll reduce it to a nice, low simmer.

Now, each bowl, when the soup is done, is going to start with some toasted bread in the bottom, help soak up some of that liquid, give you a little bit of texture.

You could do this by ripping this bread-- stale bread's fine-- into pieces, like, one-inch pieces, toasting them in a skillet for seven or eight minutes.

Toss with a little olive oil first.

We're just going to do this in a broiler.

Halfway through, you're going to want to take it out, flip the bread over, and turn it around in the oven.

So also, I'll take one clove of garlic, crush a little bit if you like.

Actually, you know what?

I am going to crush it a little bit.

Okay.

Soup is reduced.

So there is the rind.

Soggy.

Whoops, it's falling apart.

Okay, fully falling apart.

You know, the lucky person gets what's left of the rind, okay?

Normally, we poach four eggs for four servings in the soup itself instead of in water.

You always want to crack all the eggs ahead of time into a small cup or bowl.

That way, you can put them in basically at the same time.

I'm only going to do one egg now because I'm just going to serve myself.

So we'll cover this, leave it on a very low simmer.

Take just three or four minutes.

If you don't like runny yolks, you can cook it eight or nine minutes.

That would be a crime if, if you did that, but that's okay.

You could like it like that.

We like a little bit of runny yolk.

It's nice in the soup.

So we'll let that cook just three or four minutes, and then we'll start to build a bowl of soup.

♪ ♪ So you could just put each piece of toast in the bottom of a bowl.

A little hard to eat that way.

So we'll just tear this up into pieces.

♪ ♪ I always add a little salt at the end.

I always add a little... ...oil at the end.

Add a little cheese at the end.

Or a lot of cheese at the end.

(chuckling) If you feel like.

If the oils in your fingers and your hands actually get on the leaves, you're going to actually have a lot more flavor.

So it's good to tear them in pieces.

Acquacotta, cooked water.

A little bit of extra flavor added in.

You know, the celery, the onion, et cetera, a little red pepper flakes, but it's pretty simple.

And it tastes great, and of course the egg makes it.

This really is good.

♪ ♪ - Giulia also taught us about ribollita, which is a traditional Tuscan soup made with white beans and thickened with bread.

Italians are pretty literal when they name some of their recipes, so acquacotta actually means "cooked water," while ribollita means "re-boiled."

This is a soup people will make a day ahead so they can reheat it with a little bit of bread that then breaks up into the broth and adds a nice creaminess to the soup.

First, I'm going to crisp some pancetta.

So when Giulia made this soup for us, she actually used some guanciale, which is also a really nice thing that you can add.

And she added some of that guanciale rind.

And my mom actually, when she would make a soup like this, had a chunk of kind of fatty pork in the freezer that she would kind of cut off and stick in the soup.

And then you just remove it later.

But it adds so much flavor.

So I'm just going to let this pancetta crisp for three or four minutes.

And while that's happening, I'm going to purée some of my beans.

So one of the nice things about this soup is, we actually take some of the cannellini beans.

We also use some of the bean liquid.

There's about three-quarters of a cup of that here and a cup of the beans.

That gives a nice creamy texture to the soup.

You don't need a roux, you don't need butter, flour, anything like that.

It's just the beans and their liquid.

It also adds so much richness.

So this is the consistency you want.

The beans are completely puréed.

So our pancetta looks ready.

We're adding some leeks.

(pot sizzling) Carrots.

Celery.

And some garlic.

We're using leeks in here because they break down really nicely and they add a nice texture to our broth.

When you're using leeks, you want to make sure that you really clean them, because a lot of times, there's sand trapped under the leaves.

So I think the best way to do this is to chop them up and then rinse them really, really well.

There is nothing worse than a bunch of sand in your dish.

So these are nice and soft, they're nicely cooked down.

And now I'm going to add some tomato paste, and I think you heard Rosie talk about this earlier.

Tomato paste is such a great broth booster-- a little goes a long way.

So we're going to add some sprigs of thyme, which is really good in a soup like this, and a little bit of salt and some pepper.

And you'll see here we're adding water, because this just has so much flavor, with the little bit of pancetta and all the vegetables, you really don't need a chicken stock or a vegetable broth.

So now I'm going to add my bean purée.

So I'm going to add my greens now.

I have some lacinato kale.

I love adding this kind of kale to soup because even when it cooks for a long time, it stays really green.

So I always think it looks really nice, and of course, it tastes delicious.

And next, I'm going to add the green cabbage.

And this is the kind of soup where whatever greens you have, you would use.

My dad was an Italian farmer, and he had an amazing garden.

So we made soups like this all the time.

But you could use escarole, you could use spinach, you could use Swiss chard, so whatever vegetable you have that you really like would be great in this soup.

So I'm going to bring this to a simmer and I'm going to cover it and let these greens really cook down for about 40 to 45 minutes.

While the vegetables are cooking down, I'm going to prepare some bread.

We really like it with bread that's a little bit crispy, so you either put it on the bottom of the bowl and add the broth on top or sprinkle it on top so you get a nice crispy contrast.

So we're going to put our bread in a 375-degree oven for about ten minutes until it's nice and crispy.

So our vegetables have cooked down for about 40 minutes.

I'm going to add the rest of our beans.

Our ribollita is done.

As I said, you could put your croutons on the bottom of the bowl or you can put them on top.

I really like them on top, because I like that little crunchy, chewy texture.

This is really the kind of soup that is near and dear to my heart.

This is a soup we had a lot when I was growing up.

There were a lot of children in my family, so, it's a soup that you can add any vegetables that you want.

The bread kind of stretches it a little bit if you want to feed a lot of people, and that's Italian cuisine.

It's simple, delicious, and hearty.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season at MilkStreetTV.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $29.95, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪