Ribollita | How to Make Tuscan Bread Soup | Food Wishes

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Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with rebelita.

That's right. There are many, many ways to make this tuskcin bread soup. And this is my way, which I think is a really good way and a very, very thick way. In fact, we're going to make this so thick and hearty, it might not even be a soup anymore. But anyway, we'll get to that. For now, let's go ahead and get started by making some garlic oil, which I'm going to do by smashing some garlic and a little bit of salt in this mortar.

And if you don't have one of these, you can just use the back of a fork and smash the garlic in a bowl. And after that's been bashed up a bit, I'm going to add some olive oil in. And then what we'll do is give that a stir with our pestl for about 30 seconds or so. At which point, our garlic oil is going to be ready for our tor, which will be the next thing we do. And what I'll be ripping apart today is an entire loaf of Italian chabatada bread.

Although any kind of crusty French or Italian bread will work here. And what we'll do is tear this into relatively large, very jagged chunks. And once that's been torn up and spread out on a parchment line sheet pan, we will spoon, drizzle, and pour our garlic oil over the top. And then we'll use our hands to give this a nice tossing. And I should mention this is an optional step and not a traditional step, right?

But the soup is usually made with just stale bread,

but I love what happens to the taste and the texture if we infuse the bread with garlic oil and toast it first, which after spreading that out into a nice even layer, we will do at 300° for about 30 minutes or so, or until the bread's pretty much dried out and starting to toast. And while this doesn't look super crunchy, the edges definitely are. And once that's cooled down, it should probably sound like this.

And once our bread is set, there's one other thing I like to prep, which would be to add one can of drained canolini beans into a mixing bowl. And then we'll take a potato masher and we will smash and mash these until they're fairly smooth. At which point, we'll add a can of whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes and we'll use the masher to smash those in and break them up. And we can smash that as smooth or coarse as we want. Right.