How I Make Amazing Creamy Tortellini Soup

Today, we're going to make creamy sausage tortellini soup. Here are all the ingredients. Let's get into it right now. So we always like to go over the ingredients here on this channel. It makes it super simple for not just you to make the recipe, for me to instruct you how to make the recipe. So I always recommend that you prep your ingredients. We'll go from my right to my left. We have one pound of bulk sausage. This comes from Whole Foods, so there's no fennel in it. But if you buy a sausage that doesn't have the fennel in it and you like fennel, which I do, use one and a half teaspoons of fennel seeds. Just gives it a nicer flavor. We also have onion, carrot, and celery. It was one medium onion diced. It was two medium carrots diced and two celery ribs diced. That's about a cup, cup, maybe a cup and a half. A secret weapon that we always use on this channel, Parmigiano-Reggiano rinds. Just save them if you have a block of Parm. It's free and it will just flavor the soup better. If you don't have it though, totally fine. I'm using one full can of tomato paste. When I first did this recipe, I was going to use plum tomatoes. And if you want to do that, feel free to do it. But just opening up a standard six ounce can is perfect here. It works great. Six cloves of garlic minced. We have three tablespoons of flour. That's going to thicken it up a little bit. I have eight cups of chicken stock that I made from reduced sodium, better than bouillon chicken base, which I use all the time. One cup of dry white wine. If you can't have alcohol or wine or anything like that, feel free to omit it. One and a half cups of heavy cream. This is a creamy soup. If you put more in, it'll be creamier. You can also, if you decide you don't want any cream, you can completely omit it. We also have extra virgin olive oil. We're going to need that. You can use olive oil or extra virgin. We're going to do for sauteing. I have fresh basil over here, fresh parsley, about a cup of each is going to be great. And then the star, I guess, of the dish is the tortellini. Buy tortellini from the refrigerator section of whatever store you're at. They're going to be much better than the little frozen ones. This is a really good brand. It's from Whole Foods. It comes in an 18 ounce pack. So even though the recipe calls for 16 ounces, we're just going to use the whole pack. This is cheese. It's ricotta and Parmesan. If you want to use a meat-based one, you can too. But if you're going to use a meat-based tortellini, you might not need the sausage then. It's too much. I think the contrast of the cheese tortellini and the sausage is great. All right, so let's get into making the soup right now. Okay, I have an 8-quart Dutch oven. Use a regular 8-quart pot if you want, like totally fine. It's going to need to be about 8 quarts. There's the sausage, the vegetables, the tortellini, everything. It takes up a lot of room. I'm going to heat this up to medium heat. Then heat it up for a couple minutes, just a couple tablespoons of olive oil. The sausage has a lot of fat in it. This sausage I don't like. It comes in little bricks. They super compact it, but do the best you can just to spread it out and we'll let it brown a little bit. I want to talk about browning meat and not browning meat. I get a lot of comments about this saying, you didn't brown the meat enough and you left moisture in there. I'm going to give you guys some advice here. Most of that's wrong. It's just wrong. You can see master chefs in Italy taking sausages and putting them right in the sauce. No browning at all. They'll take meat too, especially when you're making a sundae sauce, all that. You do not have to do it and you don't have to kill this sausage or any meat you do because if you take all the water out of it, and a lot of that's fat too, when you're seeing the liquid go up, you are just going to make it dry, even something like sausage. Just keep that in mind. We'll get a little bit of color on this here, but it is not paramount that you do it. It will not be bad if you don't do it. It will still be great. Trust me. I'm going to just flatten this out and we'll let it brown a little bit and then we'll break it up. And to break it up, I'm going to use this. This is a meat masher. It's probably my favorite tool and it's like eight bucks on Amazon. I'm just going to flip it over. Okay, so it's been a couple of minutes. Now we're going to mash it up with our meat masher. That's pretty good. You can mash this meat up more when you take it out. We're going to take it out right now just because I won't be able to get my vegetables soft enough with all this meat in here. And we'll put it back in after. Try to leave most of the fat in there. Okay, if you leave a couple specks of sausage, it's not going to matter. So you see how it's very brown in the bottom of the pan there? All right, it's not burnt, so it's fine. Put it here. You can also deglaze right away, but I'll put these in here. I'll put a little salt, maybe a little bit of liquid, and that'll evaporate quickly. You can do a little bit of water or just a little bit of your stock, just so you don't burn the bottom of your pot. A little bit less than medium here, and what I'm going to do is add a couple more tablespoons of olive oil. The recipe says four tablespoons of olive oil, so it's like two and two, but it doesn't have to be exact. Okay, and we'll do a little pinch of salt also to get some of the liquid out of those veggies. Okay, I'm just taking my wooden spoon, flat edge of my spoon right here, this flat edge, and then I'm just going to scrape up all of the brown bits on the bottom. So now I've cleaned my pot, and now I can let the vegetables soften. Here's that meat. You can just go in here more and just mash it a little bit more, any pieces that are a little too big. It's a little cumbersome, especially I have a portable burner here, and this dutch oven weighs like 20 pounds. It has a max weight rating, and if I'm putting all that downward force on there, it's not good. If you're on a regular stove, it doesn't matter. That's good. So we want the pieces of sausage to be small in the soup. It's going to take about 10 minutes. We want these veggies to get nice and soft to really start releasing their flavors to make it nice. One thing I forgot, also when you put your vegetables in initially, put your fennel seeds in, and you can just kind of mash them up. You can also just take these and just whack them with a mallet. I'm putting them on the side there, and I'm just going to just kind of smush them. So do the best you can, then mix everything back together and let these continue to soften. Okay, so that's been about 10 minutes. You can see how the vegetables are very soft. Make sure they don't burn. So just, you know, control your heat, lower it if you need to, add a splash of water or stock or wine or whatever you like. Here's six cloves of that minced garlic. We're going to add that in now. All right, we'll cook this in here for a couple minutes until it gets fragrant. Tomato paste, six ounces of tomato paste. That's one can. If you don't want to use paste, I would say about 14 ounces, maybe a little bit more of plum tomatoes would be good. All right, so we're going to fry this paste. I'm going to accentuate the flavor by doing that, take a little bit of the tinniness flavor out of it. If you start to burn when you're frying your paste, add a little bit of liquid or control your heat. It's that simple. Okay, see how it's a little getting a little black right there, down there? Just put a little bit of liquid in there, just a bit. Okay, mix that all together. It'll evaporate in a second. It'll lower the temperature of the pot by a little bit. It'll allow you to keep cooking it. That's been a solid five minutes, and now we're going to add our flour in. This is three tablespoons. Just get it all in there. It doesn't matter where exactly it goes, and then just mix it all together. Let's just cook this out for a couple minutes, get rid of all the white specks. I have one cup of dry white wine. This is Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, un-oaked Chardonnay, anything like that is fine. Okay, turn the heat up to high, and it'll start boiling fairly quickly depending on the strength of your stove. A lot of brown bits on the bottom, and I'm going to scrape it. Using a flat spoon is easier than if you had a round spoon, and then just do it for like 30 seconds. It's going to turn into like sludge here, and I wasn't able to remove quite all of it, but I'll be able to remove the rest when I add my other liquid in, and then this is the eight cups of chicken base, chicken stock, and it's all stuck at the bottom there, so I will get the rest out. That always happens with chicken base. So again, bring this up to a boil, and then if you have any remaining brown bits, just continue to scrape with your spoon. That's just all flavor bits. It's all going to go into your soup. It's going to make it better, and how can you tell if they're all gone when you have a lot in here now? Just feel the bottom. It'll feel nice and smooth. If it feels gritty, then it's not all gone yet. Okay, also add in your sausage and your parm rinds, but yeah, there's a lot of cheese on this one at the end, so I'm just grating it all in here. Okay, now I'll put it in. It's boiling now. Just lower it a little bit to like medium, maybe a six. Just keep it like kind of around, you know, a steady bubble. We're going to let it concentrate for about 10 minutes, extract some of the flavors, some of the added parmesan brine. It's been like 10 minutes going. I'm not putting any salt or pepper or anything in here. Just the only salt we put in was what we did on the vegetables to soften them up in the beginning. Sausage is very flavorful, has a lot of seasoning in it. The cheese, everything else, the tortellini, wait to the end. Not to mention the chicken base that I used. You know, they claim it's reduced sodium. It's still extremely high in sodium. One and a half cups of heavy cream. All right, we're going to let this simmer for about 10 minutes. I want it to bubble first and then thicken a tiny bit, but this is not a thick soup. It's more like a creamy broth. Nice. So on the bag here it says two minutes. You don't need a lot of time to cook these. The residual heat, even if you dump them in and you turn it off, it'll cook them enough. All right, and I just have my heat about four out of ten, so just let these cook. Just taste one. You know, it says on the bag it's like cook them to 165 internal temperature. That's not how you're going to check if tortellini are done. All right, cook them to your liking. You know, some people like them a little softer. Some people like it firmer. Cook it to your liking. It's only going to take a couple minutes though. Let's get our parsley and basil in. A half a cup of basil and a half a cup of parsley. If you want to use spinach leaves too, that would be great. Okay, mix that all in here. All right, and there's my consistency. My brothy consistency there, like that. Honestly, it doesn't need any salt and pepper I'm going to put in. So we're going to get the taste tester down right now. Okay, James, the taste tester, you are back. Thank you for being back. You're doing two today with me, right? Yeah. Give me a fist bump, okay? It's really good. I really like this because it tastes like tomato soup. I love tomato soup. So what is it? Cheese in it? Cheese tortellini. Tastes good. This is three hours later from when I made it, just so you know. Tastes like tomato soup, like if you just had the broth, but like a little different. Yeah, I think it's different. Yeah, but like it has the same base flavor as tomato soup. Like a creamy tomato soup. Yeah, creamy tomato soup. Tortellini is good. I think my favorite thing about it is the broth, though. Okay, well that's good. I didn't make the tortellini. You didn't? I didn't. Those are not homemade tortellini. Okay, I'm gonna give this an eight. An eight? Okay. Yeah, because the broth is really good. The tortellini is like pretty good. And all the other stuff is also like pretty good. What could be better? Basically like a little bit of everything except the broth. Okay. Because the broth itself is a ten. Well, what do you mean a little bit of everything? Like the tortellini could be like a little better. Like maybe instead of putting the sausage on the outside, I'll put the sausage in tortellini. Well, that would be meat tortellini, and then you wouldn't need the sausage in the soup. That's exactly what I'm saying. You just don't put the sausage in the soup at all. Put it in the tortellini. And then maybe put like some broccoli, like little tiny pieces. I would put broccoli in that. Like just the, just like. The trees? Yeah, the tree part. The trees. Yeah, no. Mom is asking you a lot of questions because she thinks this is a ten. That's why she was asking. Really? Yeah. I mean, it could be a nine. Well, you were eating it off camera. I think it's really good, but I'm not the official taste tester. I wanted to know more, like what he thinks could be added. And I think, I think broccoli is a great idea, James. All right, James. You, uh, thanks for the pretty good rating. Do you think daddy is a pretty good dad? Am I a decent dad? He's like, he's an okay dad. All right. He's okay. He gets the job done.