Italian Soup
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When it comes to the traditional Italian meal, soups are usually served at the start of dinner. There are many popular Italian soups, including minestrone and Italian rice soup. Pasta can often be found in Italian soups, so if you would like to add pasta to one of your soups, consider using tubes, spaghetti broken into pieces or elbows. You should only ever cook the rice, grains or pasta in your soup to al dente to prevent them from becoming soggy. The best Italian soups will depend on how good the stock is. Traditional Italian soup is made to help feed large amounts of people a hearty and healthy meal. A single meat bone which was used to help flavor Italian soup recipes was incredibly valuable and it wasn't unusual for a prosciutto bone to be used by many families.
Favorite Italian Soups
Soups in the middle of Italy tend to be made up of predominantly vegetables. Some of the most popular include lentil soup, potato soup, chickpea soup and cauliflower soup. If you've been to Sicily, it's likely that you've had the pleasure of trying the fava bean soup. This uses beans that have been boiled until soft and then pureed. This is a warm soup with extra virgin olive oil from Sicily drizzled over the top. This soup is actually an ancient Italian dish that can actually be traced to the popular thick soups of the Roman era.
Italy also has a long tradition of different kinds of bread soups, which probably came out of necessity. When people were so poor that they couldn't waste anything, even stale bread, they had to find something else to do with it. They had to come up with a way to make it not only edible, but also tasty. Hence, the Italian bread soup. The most important ingredient is authentic Italian bread that has been baked right on the floor of the oven or on a pizza stone and has a firm crust that will withstand being soaked in water and won't turn into a paste.
Tuscany is the region to be credited with the famous Italian onion soup. When the princess Caterina de Medici was going to marry the future kind of France, she took with her some of the most talented Italian chefs with her so she could have Tuscan foods. The onion soup eventually becomes the popular French onion soup that so many of us know and love. Tomato and bread soup and black cabbage soup are also beloved Tuscan soups.
Pasta fazool, or Pasta e fagioli, is a comfort soup all around the world that almost every culture has developed and there are many different recipes for this favorite.
Italian Wedding Soup - Rich and Filling
When Italians migrated to the United States, they carried with them a recipe for "minestra maritata". This is a soup that originally comes from the Naples and Campania region. It has many different herbs, meats and vegetables. It is a rich, hearty dish.
The Italian name for the soup translates to "married soup" which is a reference to the way that the flavors of the ingredients blend together so well. Although it became known as "wedding soup" this is not a dish to be served only at weddings.
