Delicious Ribollita Soup | Gino D'Acampo

Tuscany has an obsession with food, and it's been this way forever. Welcome to my Tuscan retreat! Between Florence and Siena lies San Gimignano, the town of fine towers. Oh, wow! This is awesome! These towers were the skyscrapers of those days, making this the Manhattan of the Mediterranean. During the Renaissance, wealthy people displayed their wealth by building their towers a little taller than their neighbours. I'm going to make a ribollita soup, so I'm on the hunt for the perfect vegetables. Buongiorno, ragazzi! How are you? A bit of vegetables. Carrots, celery, a bit of red onion. I'm telling him what I need for my ribollita. A bit of garlic. See, this is what I love about when you buy fruit and veg in Italy. Number one, everything that you see is in season, but then the colours. If you look at the colours and the smell, it's just insane. He said, make sure that you put cavolo nero because it's very traditional. Look at this beauty. Forget about flowers, give a bunch of artichokes. At least you can eat them. He's trying to tell me how to make the ribollita. See, that's the great thing about the Italian market. When you buy something, they also give you a recipe with it. And everybody's a master of recipes. Arrivederci! Ciao, ragazzi! Ciao, ci vediamo! Something like this, look. This will be perfect. I've got my vegetables, I've got my bread. Ready to make a ribollita. The sun is shining, so that means we are going to cook outside. So, where do we start? The vegetables. I've got onions, carrots, celery and potatoes. A little bit of olive oil into a pan. Vegetables, all in there. And we're going to add a little touch of salt. The chilli flakes go in there, just to give it a kick. Fennel seeds. Bay leaves, or as we say in Italian, foglie di alloro. I put the lid on and then I put a wooden spoon like that, so some of the steam comes out. Leave it there, 12-15 minutes. Every couple of minutes you go there, stir it and everything is going to be okay. I'm starting to cook some sausages. Proper Italian fat sausages. The garlic goes in there. Not too much. Now the next step of the ribollita is the bread. We need to soak stale bread into stock. And I just take all the crunchy bits. Now, this soup here is also used when they do the Leroyka bike race here in Tuscany. They stop every couple of hours. They have a ribollita to get the energy and go for it. Now, in the vegetables we're going to add fresh tomatoes. Straight in. Thinned plum tomatoes. Add the remaining stock. Start to mix everything together. Now we're going to add the pieces of bread. Proper Italian or French, if you really have to, bread. Now, kale or cavolo nero. Straight on top. I've got some beautiful cannellini beans, already cooked. Let it simmer away for about half an hour. Every now and then, stir everything together. That's it. This is the kind of thing that I like to eat when I have a big family around. I put the pot in the middle of the table and the job is done. The only thing that I have to do, I've got my sausages. Half of it goes into the soup. And I'm going to get some of my sausages, which I like to put them on the side. I'm going to shave a little bit of cheese. Let me try. This is how you make a ribollita. Buon appetito. Guys, I really hope you like my Tuscan retreats. I'll see you very soon.