Ribollita
What is Ribollita?
It is the Tuscan soup par excellence! It is a bread soup that the next day that it becomes ‘ribollita’, i.e. putting everything back on the heat and making it ‘boil’, stirring it often with a wooden spoon: the result is, a soup with a completely different flavour from the previous one.
Main feature of Ribollita
Ribollita is one of the tricks that housewives in the countryside used to recycle leftovers, a classic "Cucina Povera" dish with a long tradition that had bread as its main nutrient. The adjective ‘Tuscan’ indicates the bread that originated in the countryside, made of flour, water and natural yeast and baked in a wood-fired oven. Another characteristic is that it is salt-free, which gives it the ability to enhance, without interfering with, the taste of other foods. Bread that is no longer fresh but not yet dry is called ‘stale’, and it is at this stage that it is best used in cooking.
Ingredients
- Stale Tuscan bread (without salt)
- Fresh cannellini beans
- Ripe or peeled tomatoes
- Black cabbage
- Savoy cabbage
- Swiss chard
- Carrots
- Celery
- Onions
- Fresh spring onions
- Parsley
- Basil
- Olive oil
- Salt
Preparation
First chop the onion, fry it with oil in a large saucepan. Then add the tomatoes, beans and roughly chop all the vegetables minus the spring onions. Season with salt and cook for about two hours on a low heat. Then cut the stale bread into slices and place a layer in a flat-bottomed soup tureen. Wet with the soup and continue with another layer of slices. The mixture should be quite liquid. Serve with a drizzle of oil and the chopped fresh spring onions.
