Ribollita

About Ribollita

Ribollita is a Tuscan bread-and-bean soup whose name means reboiled, a reference to its origins as a way of stretching leftover minestrone by simmering it again with stale bread. It is peasant cooking at its most resourceful: cannellini beans, greens and tomato built on a slow-cooked soffritto of onion, carrot and celery, then thickened with torn baguette until the whole thing turns into something between a soup and a stew. The flavor is savory, mellow and comforting, the vegetables sweetened by long gentle cooking and the beans lending a creamy backbone, all lifted by a generous pour of raw olive oil at the table. There is no meat, yet it eats as heartily as any winter stew.

The heart of this version is the bread, which is not garnish but the thickener. The baguette is torn into rough chunks and stirred in to break down and dissolve into the broth, giving ribollita its signature dense, spoon-standing texture. It starts with a properly sweated soffritto, the foundation of so much Italian cooking, cooked slowly until soft and sweet before the tomatoes, beans, spinach and stock go in. Ribollita is meant to be robust and is often even better the next day once the bread has fully melted in. Serve it hot in wide bowls with a real slick of extra-virgin olive oil over each portion and, in true Tuscan style, bread on the side.