Italian Minestrone Soup with Crispy Pancetta
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Italian Minestrone Soup with Crispy Pancetta is a super easy and even quick vegetable soup to make when you’re craving healthy, hearty but simple food. Rustic and easy to make any day of the week.
If you love Italian soup, try this orzo minestrone soup or this minestrone soup with kale.
Recipe Overview
- Italian Minestrone Soup with Crispy Pancetta is a quick and healthy recipe, taking around 30 minutes to prepare.
- The soup is adaptable, allowing for seasonal vegetables and pantry staples to fit your preference.
- Crispy pancetta adds incredible flavor, enhancing the broth’s deliciousness.
- The recipe features simple ingredients like olive oil, vegetables, stock, and pasta for a hearty dish.
- Follow step-by-step instructions for a delightful homemade minestrone soup experience.
What I Love About This Recipe
If you’re a soup lover like me, you’ve probably made countless versions of minestrone. At 31Daily, you can find plenty of variations of this favorite soup.
What makes this soup recipe a bit different is the addition of crispy pancetta. I can’t describe how incredibly delicious it is! In fact, its flavor permeates the broth, infusing the whole bowl with deliciousness.
Often minestrone soup is a dish we make to use up leftover vegetables. So feel free to experiment with the ingredients in this soup and adapt to your favorites, what you have on hand, or what’s in season at the market.
And if you’re browsing minestrone soup recipes, you may want to take a look at these recipes too:
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Soup Ingredients
While minestrone varies in ingredients and methods, I believe this simple soup deserves a spot on your soup-making calendar.
Not only is this soup simple, but the ingredients are easy to find. The specific ingredient measurements are in the recipe card below, but this will give you an idea of what’s in the soup and potential variations.
- Olive oil: I’m using extra virgin for heart-healthy fat and antioxidants. You can see the difference between regular olive oil and extra virgin olive oil in the “Tips” section below.
- Aromatics: Medium onion, garlic cloves, carrots, small leek, and celery. Note on the vegetables: I like to use large size carrots and celery. When all I can get at the market is a small size, I use 2 of each.
- Seasoning: Thyme (either fresh or dried)
- Tomato paste for intense tomato flavor
- Pancetta: When buying pancetta at the market, I like to look for diced pancetta to save myself a step. You can also substitute it for bacon.
- Vegetable stock, or chicken stock works equally well too.
- Small, short pasta: I like to use ditalini pasta, but any short, tube shaped pasta works well. You can even use broken pieces of spaghetti if you wish. Just keep the pasta on the smaller side.
- Baby spinach, kale, or any green of choice
- Grated Parmesan for serving
How to Make Minestrone Soup
This is such a quick and easy soup to make. Step-by-step instructions are in the recipe card below, but here is a quick overview:
- Step 1: Sauté onion, garlic, and pancetta in a soup pot until softened.
- Step 2: Add thyme, carrots, leek, celery, and tomato paste.
- Step 3: Pour in the broth; bring to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer for 15 minutes.
- Step 4: Stir in the pasta and cook until al dente. Toss in the spinach and cook until wilted. Ladle into soup bowls and top with grated Parmesan cheese.
Helpful Kitchen Equipment
You will need a medium-sized soup pot or Dutch oven. I’m using my very favorite 4-quart Dutch Oven I purchased at Amazon. It’s the perfect size for this recipe.
A good chef’s knife is super helpful for chopping vegetables. You will also need a vegetable peeler for the carrots.
Minestrone and Its Ancient Origins
Marcus Apicius’s ancient cookbook De Re Coquinaria describes an ancient Roman soup dating to 30 CE containing farro, chickpeas, and fava beans along with onions, garlic, and greens.
Recipes for this classic Italian soup vary from season to season, and region to region. Not to mention family recipes passed down through the generations.
The National Post says, “In the northern region of Lombardy… minestrone might include pasta and winter squash; farther south, in Tuscany, cannellini beans and cabbage or kale; in the coastal city of Genoa in the northwestern region of Liguria, it would be finished with pesto.”
Recipe FAQs & Tips
Wandering your market’s aisle looking at olive oil, you may have wondered what the difference is between olive oil and extra virgin olive oil. The difference is in the processing. Olive oil is heated to extract the oil, which is then refined, while extra virgin olive oil is unrefined and cold-pressed. Extra virgin olive oil has a distinct flavor, making it perfect for dressings, dips, and finishing oil. Regular olive oil has a more neutral flavor.
There isn’t much difference between the two. Minestrone soup is a hardier version of vegetable soup, often made with pasta or beans and traditional Italian ingredients and seasonings.
More Soup Recipes to Try Next
- Grandmother's Tomato Potato Soup
- 35 Winter Soup Recipes
- Crock Pot Chicken and Rice Soup
- New Year’s Day Black Eyed Peas Soup
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Italian Minestrone Soup with Crispy Pancetta
Equipment
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 medium onion finely chopped
- 3 garlic cloves minced
- 1 to 2 pancetta slices or bacon slices
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme or 3 sprigs fresh
- 1 large carrot quartered and thinly sliced
- 1/2 small leek halved and thinly sliced (white and pale green parts)
- 1 celery rib thinly sliced
- 1 tablespoon tomato paste
- 4 cups vegetable stock or chicken stock
- 1/4 cup dry small pasta
- 2 cups baby spinach
- grated Parmesan for serving
Instructions
- Heat oil in a heavy-bottom saucepan or small Dutch oven. Sauté the onion, garlic, and pancetta until softened, stirring frequently.
- Add the thyme, carrots, leek, celery, tomato paste, and broth to the pot. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Season with salt and pepper to taste and simmer gently for 15 minutes.
- Stir in the dry pasta and cook for another 6 to 8 minutes, or until al-dente. Stir in the spinach and cook another minutes until wilted.
- To serve, ladle the soup into soup bowls with toasted Italian bread and grated Parmesan cheese.
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Nutritional information is only an estimate. The accuracy of the nutritional information for any recipe on this site is not guaranteed.