How To Make Ribollita With Claire Saffitz | Dessert Person Dinners

I need salt. Hey everyone, I'm Clara Saffitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. Today, we have a brand new mini-series on the Dessert Person channel. It's called Dessert Person Dinners. And frankly, it's just really nice to be able to make something that I can actually eat for dinner when we wrap shooting, because I'm almost always making dessert. I recipe test all day long, and then I still have to make myself something to eat for dinner, because an expression I like to say is, a woman cannot live on dessert alone. So today I'm making an Italian dish called ribollita. It's a Tuscan dish. And it is inspired by something I always have around, which is like a little bit of stale bread. It is my favorite kind of cooking, which is like building a whole bunch of flavors in one delicious pot. La la la la la la la la la Dessert Person Dinners Ribollita is a Tuscan stew made with stale bread. And so this is not a particularly traditional version. the traditional version uses Tuscan bread, which is a different style of bread. It's unsalted. I am making it with several day old sourdough. Perhaps you caught our sourdough episode. Check that out. So it's about like layering flavors together in a single pot. It all kind of bubbles away. It's so hearty and delicious and nourishing, but also like there's something luxurious about it too. I have a Dutch oven. You could use a large sauce pan, but something big enough to fit, you know, several quarts of stew. Anything you make stew in you can use. And then I have a second large sauce pan where I cooked some beans and we'll talk about that. Now, in terms of ingredients, this stew, I'm keeping it vegetarian. And we're not for the fact that I'm adding Parmesan cheese. It would be vegan as far as I know. Sometimes I mess it up and forget about an ingredient, but it's basically a vegetable stew. There's kale in it. That's a traditional ingredient plus bread. True ribollita has cabbage in it and some other greens. So this is sort of an interpretation, but we're just gonna make like a delicious pot of ribollita-inspired stew. So this comes together like a lot of soups. I start with a mirepoix. So ingredient-wise, I'm using a lot of aromatics. I have yellow onion, fennel, carrot, and celery, some fresh rosemary, garlic, bay leaf, fennel seed, a little white wine, olive oil, of course, lots of olive oil, red pepper flakes, some whole peeled canned tomatoes, parm, both the rinds. I always save the parm rinds. These are like really dried out and old, but save them. Tuscan kale and some stale bread. And a pot of cooked white beans, which is cannellini. We need to talk about beans. I am passionate about bean cookery. When I think of ribollita, I think of kale and I think of bread, but I also think of beans. It's kind of one of the foundations of the dish. So you could use canned, but one of the reasons I opt to cook the beans myself is because I actually use the bean cooking liquid as the stock for the soup. So it's like a two-step process where there's no waste at all. It feels very complete in that way, where it's like you're using everything and you're building all these flavors and you're not losing any flavor, which I love. That's my favorite kind of cooking. Every step of the process is about building flavor. So I'm pulling out the aromatics because they've mostly just given off all their flavor. This bubbled away in the stove for quite a while. I soaked them overnight, and then this morning, I put them on the stove, I changed out the water, I salted it, and I cooked them very gently with half an onion with the skin on, just cut the whole thing in half, a whole head of garlic that I cut in half horizontally, a couple sprigs of rosemary, some bay leaves, cracked some pepper in there. I think that's it. So these are super flavorful. The beans are creamy, and this is gonna be like an important foundation of our ribollita. Once they were done, I just turned it off and left it on the stove. The main work of ribollita is just chopping, which I like chopping stuff. It's kind of soothing and meditative, as long as you keep your fingers out of the way. So I'm gonna get to work cutting up all my aromatics, and we're gonna start building everything in our Tej oven. Often I don't peel a carrot, but I'll peel it this time. What? The skin is inoffensive and it's thin, so you don't really need to, but I'm just kind of peeling it because I don't feel like scrubbing it. Also, these are great chicken scraps. Obviously I'm a baker. I've written Dessert Person, which is all about my love of baking, mostly about my love of sweet things, but I love savory cooking, and I do it all the time because everyone's gotta eat, and I enjoy it. And to me, it's like a different thing than baking. Baking is a little bit more about delayed gratification and a little more about the process. Cooking is a little more intuitive, just different muscles. So even if I'm recipe testing all day long, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of making myself dinner. So I'm gonna smash the garlic cloves. I try to be a relatively efficient cook, and so I hate chopping garlic because it gets so sticky, and I don't really think there's any point. And especially for something that we're cooking as long as this stew has plenty of time to soften and lose some of its bite, so I just smash it. Don't chop garlic. I will microplane it. That's different. That's to kind of puree it. But I don't see much use for garlic to be in any kind of form other than smashed and grated. So I'm gonna cut this fennel. Gonna mostly leave the fronds off to the side. Fennel's kind of an underutilized aromatic. I love it shaved into salads, but it's a delicious aromatic on its own. And I'm just gonna give everything a rough chop. What kind of chop are you looking for? I'm doing a medium dice, I guess you would call it. Onion in half. I don't really do the horizontal cuts and then vertical cuts. I kind of just go radially around. I don't care that much that it's perfectly uniform in size. I think chopping is something that takes people a really long time, and it just takes practice. But I wouldn't really take the shortcut of doing food processor because it just makes things really watery. All right, so for the carrot, you go, every time you cut, you just wanna make sure that you have the thing on a flat surface. So don't try to cut the carrot without having split it first. So before I move on to the final aromatic, which is the celery, I'm gonna get my pan heating, my pot rather. Dutch ovens take a little bit of time to heat up, so I'm gonna heat it over medium high. Right now it's dry. I'll add the oil in a minute, but I'll let that preheat while I slice the celery. I love celery. So when you cut and you're with the hand that you're not using to hold the knife, tuck your fingertips in and have your knuckles out. That'll help protect your hand. I'm gonna start with a lot of olive oil in my Dutch oven. It's the key to most things. You really wanna go olive oil into an already hot pan. So I'm gonna add everything in. The sizzling is good. This is a thing where, you know how I'm always talking about like, oh, this tool, you can, for baking, you can use it in cooking too. Here's a good example. My bench scraper. So while that is cooking away, and I wanna really cook down the vegetables so that they've lost most of their water and volume, and that they're soft, and I really wanna get some color on them so it's like, I'm not starting this off with pancetta or bacon or anything. This is the foundation of the flavor. So to develop that, it needs to cook for a long time. So in the meantime, you know, I'll come back and periodically stir. At this stage, the vegetables are like 90% water or whatever the percentage is, it's mostly water. So I can have it on a pretty high heat at this point because there's steam that's being released by the vegetables and it's preventing, you know, it's nothing's, I'm not gonna get any color at this early stage, even on a higher heat, but I will have to pay more attention and stir more as they cook down and the water is driven off. So then in terms of other flavor that I'm adding, I have some fennel seed, I have some red pepper flakes, and I have some fresh rosemary. So I'm just stripping the leaves from the stalk. I'm also gonna give a rough chop to some fennel seeds. It's kind of annoying because they like fly everywhere. I don't need a lot, just a pinch. And then the fennel, you could crush it in a mortar and pestle too. And I'm not going to like a powder, I just want to break up the seeds a little bit. As far as red pepper, probably a big pinch. I mean, these can bring some heat, so I don't want to do it too much, but that looks good. All right, so I'm gonna add some salt because I want to draw out the moisture of the veg. And also whenever you're doing any cooking, you should season at every stage because adding salt, starting early in the process and adding as you go will develop a lot more flavor than just adding it at the end. I mean, it's night and day. Now the bean liquid is salted, so I don't want to go too much too soon. You can always adjust at the end. But in my experience, most people, I think under salt. You can always add an extra little pinch and you'll probably find that it makes a difference. Now a Dutch oven is nice because it heats evenly. And it means that if you have some, you know, veg stuck around the sides, that they won't burn. That's important. Oh, Maya. Sorry, Maya. This is cooking down nicely. I'd say it's lost volume by about a third. And now I'm gonna add the rosemary, fennel, red pepper flakes. Now I might add a splash more of olive oil. I really want that fennel and rosemary to fry, so add a little more oil, not a lot. Kale. Kale, okay. So this is Tuscan kale, aka dinosaur kale, aka lacinato kale. I don't know why it has so many names. And I don't care if it's wet because I'm just gonna add it to the soup. So this is continuing to cook down. It's looking super tasty and getting some nice browning. I'm gonna strip the leaves from the stems. Cal, you chicken eat the stems? Can I give them to you? Yeah. Okay, great. So stripping the leaves from the stems is really easy. Save those for your chickens. I give them to the rabbit. Or the rabbit. Rabbits don't eat the kale. Or the raccoons. Or the raccoon. They don't like kale, do they? No, they like the chickens. They like the chickens. They like the kale. Only like kale-fed chickens. So how many minutes has that been to go? It's probably been going 15 minutes at least. You know, if you were to let this go until the vegetables are like really well-browned, you'll get so much flavor. I'm gonna cut the kale. And actually, I think I'm gonna cut it in half first. I'm gonna turn up the heat, but I'm gonna constantly stir it. I just want like delicious olive oil fried vegetable flavor. I like the amount of browning on the bottom. I turn the heat down to medium. And now I'm gonna add just the liquid from the can of whole tomatoes to deglaze. And then we cook everything down again. Get some more caramelizing on the bottom. Do I look like I'm sweating? Because I am. It's a little hot in here. I would say that was about a half a cup. I'm going to crush the tomatoes in my hands and add them to the pot. Now, you have to be careful with whole peeled tomatoes because there's a lot of tomato juice in the tomato. I hold my hand really far down in the pot because inevitably I get juices like all over my apron. You just crush them up in your hands. We are ready for the beans. So that's about 2 1⁄3 of the beans. I'm gonna add the liquid and kind of see where I am in terms of the level. If I feel like I don't have enough bean liquid, I can always supplement with water. I think people somehow think that like water is a subpar ingredient. Oh, why not add stock? But in this case, like there's so much flavor in here. You can use water. This is my stock. It's bean stock. I'm gonna add my parm rinds and let these simmer with everything. And I'm also gonna taste it for salt. So my tomatoes had no salt. I did salt my aromatics. Beans are salted. So now I'm gonna just sort of see where we are. I'm sure I'll need to add more. I just don't wanna overshoot it too early. When you're cooking with these ingredients that are acidic, when you first taste it before it's really had a chance to cook together, it can be sort of sharp and like a little, even harsh. So just know that, like can kind of assault your palate a little bit. Just know that that first taste might be a little bit like of a shock and everything will kind of smooth out as you cook it. Need salt. So I'm gonna add, that seems good. I'm gonna bring this to a simmer. Then I'll add the kale. How hot is it in here? Jeez. 79. Oh, wow. 81. Kale? I would say ready. 83. Remember, I just added salt, but now I'm adding kale. So I'll have to probably add a little more salt. This is just the process of like tasting and seasoning. I always tell people like, taste your food. Do you taste your food? And a lot of times the answer is no. Season as you go, taste, adjust. Your food will taste much better. I'm gonna cover this and then I'm going to prep the bread while all of this cooks down. This is two-day-old bread. You could still toast it and eat it and be great. But I think bread achieves, like day-old bread achieves a higher calling in a dish like this. And by the way, because it's staled, I don't even really need a bread knife to get through it. So I'm gonna cut a couple of slices. I'm just gonna make kind of like a serving for one or two. But if you're making this for family, I would, I don't know, these are kind of big slices. So this is maybe like for two portions or something. So you could do more. I really love the texture of bread that's been well-toasted and then is allowed to absorb all of these like flavorful juices and broth and everything. And also if there's one thing I love, it's bread that's been toasted and then rubbed with some raw garlic. I feel like with a stew, where you're really creating these well-developed flavors, but cooked flavors, it's so nice to have like that raw bite of something on top at the end. So I have my pieces of bread. I'm gonna oil them. You can brush it on if you wanted to. If I were making this for like dinner for, you know, four people or six people or however many, I would put all of the slices on a sheet tray and probably broil or bake at a super high temp. But I'm only really doing like one or two servings. So I don't wanna heat up my whole kitchen. So I'm just gonna do it in my toaster. And while that is toasting, I have my leftover garlic clove. Waiting for my bread to toast. I'll rub it with some garlic. And then once this has simmered for 15 minutes or so, we'll put together the final dish. So I'm gonna turn this off. I'm gonna mostly ladle in some of the solids. I got all the beans. I got the kale. Then I'm gonna do the bread on top. Then I'm gonna go back in with some of the liquid because I want the bread to soak all of that up. This looks so good. Now I'm gonna do a bunch of parm. You could do like big shavings with a vegetable peeler, but I like it this way because I want it to dissolve a little bit into the soup. You know, for cooking, you use one olive oil. For finishing, where you're really gonna be able to appreciate the complexity of olive oil, I like sort of a slightly nicer finishing oil. I'm kind of making it fancy. Like you could just throw everything together, but like we're making a video. So a little green on top. I'm gonna taste the soup part first. We got some of the beans, some olive oil, and the kale. That was delicious, but what I really want to eat is the bread. And that step of like pouring some of the liquid in the broth over the top, it's really soaked through the bread. And now it's spoonable and soft. To me, the dish, it doesn't live or die by the quality of the bread, but like the better quality of the bread, the more elevated this will be. It's so good. Are you still tasting the sourness of that bread? Yeah, I really do. This was a pretty sour, sourdough. And I like food with a lot of acid. So it's like, I love that I can still taste the character of the sourdough and I get that tang from the bread. Feels like really nourishing, but also kind of luxurious with like the bread. And I also love the very kind of subtle burn of the garlic. That's what I want. I kind of want to eat like a version of this all the time. Either this or noodles. And I'm super happy. Or rice. Just like a lot of carbs. That was the bite. It can also be a real like, you can make like a version of ribeye that's like clean your fridge out. Grab that random half an onion, grab that piece of whatever old veg, you know, root veg, it could be anything. Throw it all together. But it really is about layering all of the flavors and creating that order of operations where you're developing flavor at every step, cooking everything down, getting some browning, balancing everything out in terms of salt and acid. I think it's a really instructive dish for, you know, but also like really easy and approachable for beginner cooks, plus using up leftovers. Thank you for watching. It's like weird, but also exciting that we get to cook something in Dessert Person. Why didn't we do this sooner? But I love it. As I said, everyone's got to eat. So try ribolita. It was a lot of fun to make. Thank you for watching and like and subscribe. More energy. Cut.