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Actor and cookbook author Stanley Tucci says that ‘soup is life in a pot’. A metaphor with which he poetically sums up what for him is one of the ‘greatest culinary inventions’, and which he immortalises in his book ‘What I Ate in One Year’.
Tucci’s culinary experimentation with soup transcends any book or piece of writing to reach kitchens around the world. In his own words, it can be served hot or cold; it can be cooked fast or slow; it can be eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner; it can be vegetarian, vegan, paleo, pescatarian or carnivorous; it can be simple or complex; it can comfort, soothe, refresh and restore. That dedication to the dish is summed up in a series of tips and tricks to take this dish to luxury status. Take note.
1. Make the most of seasonal products
There is no such thing as soup season for Tucci. It’s a timeless dish that can be made with seasonal ingredients, as it is in summer, and can be flavoured with green beans, squash or tomatoes in her ‘grandmother’s mini-soup’. In ‘The Tucci Cookbook’, she shares that this recipe can even be served hot or cold, and can be easily altered depending on what vegetables you have in your fridge.
2. Add a drizzle of olive oil
In Italian cooking, a drizzle of good extra virgin olive oil is essential for almost every dish. Stanley recommends, in this regard, adding a drizzle to both the miniestra, noting that it will help to enhance the flavours of these vegetable soups. It also adds a bright note to heavier soups, such as his pea and ham hock soup from The Tucci Table. In some recipes with creamier bases, he even adds truffle oil, which can completely change the result.
3. Make broth from leftover soup
True soup connoisseurs know how to make soup with almost anything left over in the fridge, as well as how to use leftover soup to make other kinds of soups. Tucci mentions this ‘trick’ as a note on his chicken soup with tiny chicken meatballs in the book, which was his grandmother’s signature soup recipe. The soup starts with simmering a kilo chicken and some vegetables for about half an hour, then straining it before adding the shredded cooked chicken, chicken meatballs and cooked and diced onions and carrots to the broth to cook it further. The result is so tasty that you can strain the leftovers and use the broth as a base for your next soup.
4. Bring tomato soup to a simmer
A tomato soup requires less time than the rest. Specifically, Tucci’s Tuscan soup recipe 40 minutes of simmering. ‘When you cook something with tomato, as my mother always says, you want it to lose its tomato flavour,’ Tucci writes with the recipe in The Tucci Table. ‘By that she means slow-cooking the acidity or tartness of the tomatoes, allowing their sweetness to emerge.’ With this in mind, I will always give my tomato soup enough time to mellow.
5. Fry herbs for garnish
Topping a bowl of soup with fresh herbs, a few croutons or even a dollop of sour cream can make a recipe take a multi-degree turn. Tucci even goes a step further, and fries them, as he does with fried parsley sprigs to his potato and leek soup, an addition that was actually created by his wife, Felicity Blunt, and featured on The Tucci Table.
6. Cook pasta separately
Adding spoon-sized pasta to a minestrone or noodles to a chicken and vegetable soup can turn a light lunch into a hearty meal, but it can become too bland. To avoid this, Tucci’s suggestion is as follows: he suggests cooking the noodles in chicken noodle soup separately, rather than in the soup itself. This technique ensures that the pasta is always al dente.
