What makes a good minestrone?

Minestrone is less a recipe than a habit: whatever the season and the vegetable drawer offer, cooked into a thick, generous soup. That freedom is why it can be wonderful or watery. The difference is not the list of ingredients but the order, the base and a few small finishing moves.

What minestrone is

Wikipedia's minestrone entry describes it as a thick vegetable soup of Italian origin, typically with onion, carrot, celery, potato, cabbage, tomato and courgette, often with beans or chickpeas, and sometimes pasta or rice. It notes that the vegetables are in pieces rather than puréed, that it is traditionally made without meat, and that it has no precise recipe and varies widely across Italy with the season. The name is the augmentative of minestra, soup: a big soup.

So there is no single correct minestrone. There are good ones and dull ones.

Start with the base

The flavour of the whole pot is set in the first stretch of cooking.

• Onion, carrot and celery, finely chopped, cooked slowly in a generous amount of olive oil until soft, sweet and lightly golden. This is a soffritto, and it matters.
• Garlic towards the end of that step.
• A spoonful of tomato paste, fried in the oil until it darkens, or a few chopped tomatoes cooked down.

A minestrone that skips this, and simply boils vegetables in water, tastes like vegetable water.

Add vegetables in order

This is the real skill. Different vegetables cook at different speeds, so add them in stages:

1. Long cookers first: potato, squash, carrot chunks, fennel, celeriac.
2. Middle: cabbage, cavolo nero, chard stems, green beans, leeks.
3. Quick ones last: courgettes, peas, spinach, chard leaves, broad beans.

Cut everything to roughly bite-sized pieces, small enough to sit on a spoon. Add enough water or stock to cover, and keep it at a gentle simmer.

Beans for body

Beans make minestrone feel like a meal. Cannellini, borlotti or chickpeas all work. Tinned beans are perfect: add them with the middle vegetables so they have time to soak up flavour. Mash a ladleful against the side of the pan to thicken the soup slightly. Cooking from dried? Cook them separately first; our page on soaking dried beans explains.

Pasta or rice

A small handful of short pasta (ditalini, small shells, broken spaghetti) or rice goes in towards the end and cooks in the soup, thickening it as it releases starch. Two things to remember:

• Add more liquid when the pasta goes in; it drinks a lot.
• Pasta keeps swelling. If you plan leftovers, cook the pasta separately and add it to each bowl, or the soup turns into a stew overnight.

The Parmesan rind trick

Drop a piece of Parmesan or Grana Padano rind into the pot with the water. As the soup simmers, it softens and gives the broth a rounded, savoury depth. Fish it out before serving (or cut it into small pieces for whoever loves the chewy bits). Our page on Parmesan rinds has more uses.

Finishing

• Taste for salt at the end, especially if you used a rind or stock.
• Let it rest a few minutes off the heat. Minestrone tastes better warm than scalding, and in summer it is lovely barely warm.
• Raw olive oil at the table, a generous thread over each bowl.
• Grated cheese, a spoonful of pesto in summer, or chopped parsley.

Through the seasons

• Spring: peas, broad beans, asparagus, spring onions, a lot of herbs.
• Summer: courgettes, green beans, tomatoes, basil, and a spoonful of pesto stirred in.
• Autumn and winter: squash, cabbage, cavolo nero, potatoes, borlotti, a sprig of rosemary.