Sausage, Butter Bean & Vegetable Soup with Parsley Pesto

A little Tuscan-inspired number, kinda ribollita-ish but with the added extra of some porky ingredients. I prefer making big crunchy croutons as opposed to throwing in stale bread (traditional for ribollita) because no one wants a scary, soggy, bready clump in their leftovers the next day. You can swap most of the ingredients out with what you have at home and it’ll all still taste pretty good. Don’t have any fresh fennel but you have a bunch of celery? Go for it. For my veggie friends, the obvious move here is to just take out the meat and it’ll still be a very good time I promise.

Soup

50g pancetta (cut into batons)
3 Italian pork sausages
1 teaspoon fennel seed
½ cup white wine
1 red chilli (sliced)
½ brown onion (finely diced)
1 carrot (finely diced)
½ fresh fennel bulb (finely diced)
4 cloves garlic (sliced)
Salt and pepp
2 litres of vegetable stock (see homemade note in the intro)
400g crushed tomatoes (Mutti polpa is ideal)
1 tin butter beans (rinsed and rinsed again)
½ bunch cavolo nero (leaves stripped from the stem and chopped into strips)
Parmigiano Reggiano (to serve)

Parsley Pesto

1 cup parsley
½ lemon (rind only)
½ cup olive oil
⅓ cup pine nuts
1 clove garlic
Salt

Croutons

Crusty bread (old is best!)
3 tbsp olive oil

Make it

Put the pancetta in a large, cold saucepan. Turn on the heat to medium and let the fat render out and the pancetta crisp up. Next squeeze the sausage meat out of the casings into 3cm pieces straight into the pan and break them up so you’ve got a mix of small and large pieces. Add the fennel seeds and let the sausage brown in the pancetta fat (add a little olive oil here too if you need it). Add the wine and let it simmer till it’s almost all gone.

Add in the chilli, onion, carrot, fennel, garlic and a pinch of salt and let it all sweat down for 15-20 mins on low-medium heat till the onions begin to turn translucent (this may take longer depending on your pan and how large you cut everything. Add the stock, tomatoes and beans allow it all to simmer on medium for around 15-20 minutes so the liquid evaporates and intensifies and the tomatoes cook down. Add the cavolo nero and simmer for another 5 minutes. At this point it’s up to you, if you like something more brothy you can keep it as is or keep simmering till it’s at the point you’d like it.

To make the pesto, blitz all the ingredients in a blender. Yep, that’s it. To make the croutons, chop the bread into 4cm cubes and heat the oil in a large saucepan till it’s hot and shimmering (not smoking). Add the bread and keep tossing it around in the oil till all sides are golden. You might need to keep adding a drizzle of oil as the bread soaks it up, this is fine, fried bread is what we’re after here. You can also do this in the oven if that’s more your style — just toss the bread in oil and toast at 180˚c till golden.

To serve, plate up the soup in a shallow bowl, drop around a couple of teaspoons of the pesto, grate with Parmigiano and top with the crunchy croutons and a drizzle of olive oil.