1000’s on Reddit Love This Comforting Soup—This is How I Made It Higher

There are two members of our staff who’re consistently lurking on Reddit: our editorial director Daniel and me. Once I’m not guffawing on the silliness of boards devoted to eggs in unusual locations or slices of bread stapled to timber, I’m perusing the cooking subreddits, the place I get inspiration for recipes and, every so often, anonymously reply culinary questions. Just lately, my feed’s been full of posts devoted to what Redditors are calling “the soup,” “updoot soup,” or “upvote soup,” a creamy slow-cooker soup with hen, spinach, and tortellini. 

Apparently the soup has been making the rounds on Reddit since not less than 2017, and whereas some customers love the meal sufficient to incorporate it of their common rotation, others describe it as an “aggressively mid” recipe that requires many tweaks with the intention to style good. (There’s even a thread by which individuals share their favourite variations on the unique recipe.) Curious to see what the hype was all about, I made a decision to present the authentic recipe, or what’s supposedly the unique recipe, a attempt. 

The recipe instructs cooks to microwave onions, flour, basil, garlic, and tomato paste with a drizzle of olive oil earlier than tossing it right into a sluggish cooker with hen broth, diced tomatoes, and boneless, skinless hen thighs. The soup cooks for a whopping 4 to 6 hours on low warmth earlier than you end it with tortellini, spinach, Parmesan, and heavy cream. Whereas it was extremely simple to make, it simply wasn’t flavorful sufficient for my liking. However I felt it had a whole lot of potential. So, like my fellow Redditors, I made a decision to place my very own spin on the soup. This is what I did to take this soup from, sure, “aggressively mid,” to truly scrumptious.

Methods to Make Really Good Creamy Tortellini Soup

Ditch the microwave and sluggish cooker. I perceive the enchantment of a set-it-and-forget-it meal, however it is a fast, simple dinner that actually doesn’t require (or profit from) both equipment, and also you’re significantly better off taking the time to brown your aromatics.

Swap out the hen for sausage. As an alternative of chucking in a number of boneless, skinless hen thighs, I began the soup by sautéeing juicy Italian sausage, which has a candy, floral be aware from fennel seeds, in a big pot. Then I additional constructed taste by utilizing the leftover fats from the sausage to cook dinner my fragrant soffritto (extra on that under) proper in the identical pan.

Sauté a soffritto. Italian soffritto has the identical constructing blocks as mirepoix—a combination of onion, carrots, and celery ceaselessly used as a flavorful base for dishes in French delicacies—although it might additionally comprise fennel, parsley, and/or garlic. For a soup with layers of taste, my soffritto features a mixture of onion, garlic, celery, carrot, and fennel, plus fennel seeds and a pinch of crushed crimson pepper flakes. As talked about above, I cooked this combination within the sausage fats, scraping up the fond to type probably the most flavorful base doable for the soup.

For a pleasant dose of umami, use tomato paste as an alternative of diced tomatoes. Although recent and canned tomatoes comprise loads of glutamic acid (a chemical that offers meals an umami be aware), reaching for them of their concentrated type—tomato paste—is a straightforward, minimal-effort option to give the soup an intense savory taste with hints of tangy sweetness.

Thicken with flour. To assist thicken the soup and provides it further physique, I coat the greens with flour, then cook dinner the combination for a number of minutes. Not solely does this assist take away the flour’s uncooked taste, however it additionally prevents disagreeable and ugly lumps from forming within the soup.

Skip the spinach and use a hardy inexperienced. Spinach is scrumptious, however it doesn’t have fairly sufficient heft to face up on this creamy, sturdy soup. So as an alternative of spinach, I like to recommend utilizing a hardy inexperienced like curly or lacinato kale, Swiss chard, or collard greens, which received’t get misplaced among the many tortellini and items of sausage.

Cook dinner the pasta by itself. As tempting as it’s to make this a really one pot meal by cooking the pasta within the soup, it’s value taking the time to cook dinner the tortellini individually. This lets you management the doneness of the pasta and prevents the tortellini from overcooking and dissolving into the soup, creating an unappetizing mushy mess.

Serve it with dollops of pesto and loads of Parmigiano-Reggiano. As an alternative of incorporating basil into the soup, which many variations name for, I high the soup with pesto for a contact of candy, herbaceous taste. A beneficiant bathe of nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano brings all of it collectively, and makes every chew splendidly savory.

November 2024