We Took a Reddit-Well-known Tortellini Soup and Made It Even Higher

There are two members of our staff who’re continually 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, now and again, anonymously reply culinary questions. Lately, my feed’s been stuffed with 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 no 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 to be able to style good. (There’s even a thread by which folks share their favourite variations on the unique recipe.) Curious to see what the hype was all about, I made a decision to offer the unique recipe, or what’s supposedly the unique recipe, a strive. 

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 really scrumptious.

The best way to Make Really Good Creamy Tortellini Soup

Ditch the microwave and sluggish cooker. I perceive the attraction of a set-it-and-forget-it meal, however this can be a fast, simple dinner that basically 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 a substitute of chucking in a number of boneless, skinless hen thighs, I began the soup by sautéeing juicy Italian sausage, which has a candy, floral word from fennel seeds, in a big pot. Then I additional constructed taste by utilizing the leftover fats from the sausage to prepare 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 mix of onion, carrots, and celery incessantly used as a flavorful base for dishes in French delicacies—although it might additionally include 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 pink 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 a substitute of diced tomatoes. Although recent and canned tomatoes include loads of glutamic acid (a chemical that provides meals an umami word), reaching for them of their concentrated type—tomato paste—is a simple, minimal-effort solution to give the soup an intense savory taste with hints of tangy sweetness.

Thicken with flour. To assist thicken the soup and provides it additional physique, I coat the greens with flour, then prepare 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 unpleasant 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, strong soup. So as a substitute of spinach, I like to recommend utilizing a hardy inexperienced like curly or lacinato kale, Swiss chard, or collard greens, which gained’t get misplaced among the many tortellini and items of sausage.

Prepare dinner the pasta by itself. As tempting as it’s to make this a very one pot meal by cooking the pasta within the soup, it’s value taking the time to prepare 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 a substitute of incorporating basil into the soup, which many variations name for, I prime 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.

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