Ina Garten-Inspired Winter Minestrone Soup

Compiled by Igor Kukolj, Editor. Nobody here has cooked this — how these are made.

Vegetable soups made at home tend to taste like the sum of their vegetables. This one has a component most people throw away.

Drop a Parmesan rind into the pot and simmer it for the full hour. It softens, gives up glutamates and dissolved fat, and leaves the broth with a savoury weight you cannot get from stock cubes or from cheese grated over at the table. Fish it out before serving, or leave it in for whoever finds it.

Save the rinds in the freezer. They cost nothing and they are the single best thing you can do to a vegetable soup.

Cook the pasta separately

Pasta added to the pot absorbs broth as it cooks and keeps absorbing it in the fridge, which is why leftover minestrone is often a damp stew. Boil it apart, keep it apart, and put it in the bowl before the soup goes over.

Build the base slowly, then add the fast things late

Onion, carrot and celery need fifteen minutes over medium heat to sweeten — this is the flavour floor of the whole pot. Butternut and beans go in with the stock. The greens go in during the final five minutes, or they turn khaki and bitter.

Mash some of the beans

A ladleful of beans crushed against the side of the pot and stirred back in thickens the broth without flour and without a blender. It is the difference between vegetables sitting in liquid and a soup that holds together.

Storing

Five days in the fridge, three months frozen — always without the pasta. It thickens as it stands; loosen with stock rather than water so you are not diluting what you built.