{"id":1913,"date":"2025-02-10T19:35:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-10T19:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/?p=1913"},"modified":"2025-02-11T03:39:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T03:39:31","slug":"week-of-soups-2-ribollita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/week-of-soups-2-ribollita\/","title":{"rendered":"Week of soups #2: Ribollita"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I have to say, on this <\/span>week of soups<\/b> I was a bit trepidatious about trying the <\/span>ribollita<\/i><\/b> recipe (p. 87) in the <\/span>Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Given my weird job as a travel writer (and an adolescence partly in Italy), I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in Tuscany, and even written about the Italian region in seven guidebooks over multiple editions, including hundreds of restaurant reviews.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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In other words, I am a terrible <\/span>ribollita<\/span><\/i> snob\u2014a bit of a contraction, I suppose, considering that this is actually a Tuscan peasant soup.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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But since I have sampled probably 50 or 60 <\/span>ribollita<\/span><\/i> variations over the years, I was not\u2014forgive me\u2014expecting much from the Weight Watchers recipe.<\/span><\/p>

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I was so very, very wrong.<\/span><\/p>

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I\u2019ve tried making ribollita at home myself several times, using everything from cookbook recipes from celebrity chef to instructions scribbled down by restaurant owners.<\/span><\/p>

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This quick and easy Weight Watcher recipe produced by far the most authentic results.<\/span><\/p>

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My previous ribollitas were sometimes decent\u2014though never worth repeating\u2014and one or two were spectacular failures\u2014though that\u2019s really on me and my youthful misunderstanding of some vital ingredients.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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See, technically a <\/span>ribollita<\/span><\/i> can have pretty much anything in it. It\u2019s name means \u201cre-boiled.\u201d You take whatever yesterday\u2019s soup was, pour it over slabs of yesterday\u2019s bread, and heat it all up. This makes the little bit of leftover soup go farther, and it softens up the otherwise stale bread for eating.<\/span><\/p>

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That said, all classic <\/span>ribollitas<\/span><\/i> share a few key ingredients in addition to the stale bread: cannellini (if you can\u2019t find them, great northern white beans are similar), tomatoes, and <\/span>cavolo nero.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

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See, it was that last one that tripped me up when I first attempted to recreate this Tuscan classic. <\/span>\u201cCavolo nero\u201d<\/span><\/i> translates literally as \u201cblack cabbage,\u201d which I had never heard of in English, so on my first go I just substituted red cabbage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Huge mistake.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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I ended up with a dirty grey, distinctly inedible Frankensoup, not to mention a cabbage stink that hung around the house for days.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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I have since learned that <\/span>cavolo nero<\/span><\/i> is not cabbage at all, but a kind of kale. It is essentially what we call lacinato kale (sometimes sold as \u201cdinosaur kale\u201d)\u2014though the Tuscan version has a narrower and darker leaf.<\/span><\/p>

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Armed with this knowledge and the <\/span>Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook,<\/span><\/i> I managed to make the best homemade <\/span>ribollita<\/span><\/i> of my life.<\/span><\/p>

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As always, I altered the recipe a bit. I only used about half as much onion (inexplicably, most recipes out there vastly overestimate the amount of onion needed), as well as half the amount of bread (there\u2019s no need to layer it, as in the recipe; just pour the soup over a single basement layer of bread slices).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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I was also planning to use only half the stock called for, since I know the consistency of true\u00a0 <\/span>ribollita<\/span><\/i> is more of a stew than a soup. However, since the bread soaked up much of the liquid\u2014and since dinner was unexpectedly delayed and the soup simmered for nearly six hours instead of one\u2014I did end up with the full portion of chicken broth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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I also used considerably more olive oil. Yes, I know\u2014but, hey: I skimped on the bread, remember? And that is a refined carb, rather than a healthy, natural fat.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Besides, in Italy they pour on enough olive oil that it could be technically considered the broth, so I was actually cutting back.<\/span><\/p>

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The result? This ribollita recipe has already received multiple requests to be added to the regular meal rotation.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Encountering an old favorite while cooking my way through the Weight Watchers new cookbook<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,96],"tags":[12,100,19,121,20,120],"class_list":["post-1913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food","category-web","tag-article","tag-column","tag-food","tag-man-outdoors","tag-recipes","tag-weight-watchers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1913"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1918,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913\/revisions\/1918"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}