How to Make Minestrone Soup with Keith Floyd
Strange things happened you see. I’m filming this -- will take four hours and nobody on the production team realized it was Sunday. We’re on the miles and miles from nowhere. So it was a no crew lunch, so I thought to please them all. I’ll make that classic Italian soup Minestrone Verdure.
Okay, so the first thing we have to do Dennis is wax some wonderful olive oil into the pot, lots and lots and lots of olive oil, like so. Then we will add -- and by the way, with the Minestrone, you can add any kinds of vegetable you like but preferably some dried beans, you must have probably some peas or some runner beans, cabbage, celery, tomatoes, and all those kind of things.
First of all, we put in some onions and we’ll soften those on a little bit. And while the softening down. I’ll chop up some celery. And hopefully that all wives tale that celery leaves are poisonous, they are not. They are very, very good that get into the Minestrone at the end extra flavoring.
So far, it’s a step-by-step recipe. So far, onions and celery. Next thing, some chopped carrot. They were all extremely happy here today because this farm up here, lost in the mountains is absolutely joyous. They make their own cheeses. They make their own goat’s cheese and cow’s cheese. They are all genuinely, a totally self sufficient family living in a spectacular part of the world. Right, the tomatoes are chopped.
So they’ll go straight into the pot now with all that juices as well. Remember this is a country soup. We don’t have to worry about bits and skin in this kind of food. We want every ounce of flavor we can get from these wonderfully fresh vegetables.
Let’s add some more olive oil to that. We can’t have too much olive oil in my view. That then is our holy trinity. That’s the base. That’s the tomatoes, the celery and the onions, and of course the base of our soup. Stay with that Dennis just for a second.
The next thing I must do is add some what we call, older shot stocked in the army catering called. All the hot stock is otherwise known as water. So the water goes in. we let that simmer. In fact, indeed, we bring that to the boil and then we return to it and add all of the other ingredients in about 20 minutes time.
Alright, those of you very observant people might have noticed that in the primary stage, I forgot to add the soaked dried beans. Well luckily, it doesn’t really matter because these are out of a jar and they’re already cooked so I can’t pop them in right now. I don’t often cheat but sometimes I have to because I forgot.
So the beans go in and the little pieces of broken up spaghetti go in. Now we take a few seconds to cook because I have very, very tiny pieces. Then, our cabbage goes in. Two big handfuls of cabbage. Beautiful broad beans go in fresh new season’s broad beans, and a good handful or a handful, that’s far too much, a good pinch of sea salt.
So stay with that for a second piece Dennis when I get some excellent celery leaves. We’ll shred some celery leaves in, and will also stay there we’ll shred some nice parsley leaves in. We just bring that to the boil now so that the fresh green vegetables and the spaghetti cooked very quickly. And there we have -- we will have in a few minutes time. A superb, very simple, very fresh, very authentic, Minestrone Verdure.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services