TMHB Recipe Test Drive: Homemade Zuppa Toscana
Trying to recreate Olive Garden's Magic Soup, from Allrecipes
When you live in the Philadelphia area, Olive Garden gets a teensy-bit exposed for what it is - mid-range at-best chain Italian fare that you go to for one of three occasions. One, you want cheap food that will be easy on your kids. Two, they’re running the Never-Ending Pasta promotion. Three, you really want the soup, salad, and breadsticks lunch. These chain places aren’t completely mid from top to bottom. Dirty secret. Many of them have at least one menu item or one milieu in which they thrive. Call it the culinary guilty pleasure. For Olive Garden, those items are generally contained in the last of those three reasons to go there.
The breadsticks are the stuff of legends. It’s hard to fuck bread up, although lord knows, some places that actually make you pay for the stuff have done things to it that reflexively make nonnas weep miles away. Olive Garden has perfected the breadstick in terms of texture and serving temperature (read, warm) AND they brush that layer of garlic butter on them to turn their addictiveness up to 11. The soups are another notch in their belt. They have four offerings - Pasta e Fagioli1, Minestrone, Chicken and Gnocchi, and Zuppa Toscana. I’m not a big fan of the first two as a rule. The Chicken and Gnocchi soup is good, but it doesn’t hit the way the Zuppa does.
Ever since I first had it SEVERAL years ago, I fell in love with Zuppa. Something about the mix of potatoes, kale, and sausage in a light creamy broth just did it for me. Every time I ate there, I’d get a bowl of the stuff in front of my face and sometimes, I would take advantage of their liberal “unlimited soup refills” and get two bowls, back in my “heavy eating” stage. Of course, in the age of cooking by Internet, there are copycat recipes to be had for anything you want. A lot of YouTube chefs dedicate videos to recreating fast food or chain meals.
My ex made a copycat Chicken and Gnocchi soup, but she did it based on palate and feel. I maybe could have done the same with Zuppa Toscana, but I’m also not nearly at the level where I can wing it and create something as close to the real thing as possible. In fact, you’ll see from this exercise that at least aesthetically, I was a *little* bit off from what you get at the Olive Garden. However, it still tasted close to, if not better than the real thing.
First off, the recipe I used I found at Allrecipes. It’s not the sexiest site, but it has served me well in the past. Generally speaking, I intended on following recipes to the letter for this feature. However, there were three minor substitutions I made from the list. First, instead of onion, I used shallot. Why? To quote the chili recipe from Drew Magary’s annual Super Bowl Jamboroo at Deadspin and then Defector, shallots are what make restaurant food taste like restaurant food. Second, instead of mild/sweet sausage, I used hot sausage. Why? I’m a spicy boi. What can I say? Third, I used kale instead of spinach, which was a possibility left in the actual text of the recipe. Why? Because Zuppa Toscana has kale in it at Olive Garden. Spinach is good, but it’s not hearty enough to stand up to everything in this soup.
So the first thing that concerned me aesthetically but not overall was the sheer amount of fond on the bottom of the dutch oven from the sausage. On one hand, it did make the broth a little darker than I would have liked. On the other, fond is flavor, and you want all those brown bits incorporated into the soup. I used a mandoline slicer to get the potatoes cut in the familiar shape for the soup, and I broke them up with a wooden spoon when they got fork tender so I didn’t have giant potato rounds in the mix.
The end result was something that tasted a lot like the genuine article, but both the appearance and texture were a bit more embellished than what I would normally get. The color was a little darker, although the addition of the heavy cream lightened up the simmer substantially. It also appeared much thicker than the restaurant serving, which I attribute to perhaps cooking the potatoes a little longer than they do at the Olive Garden. Once you cook potatoes down, you get all those starches leaching out, and that’s how you get a thick soup without needing too much roux or extraneous slurry2. In fact, the next day, the soup was much closer in consistency to a stew. I didn’t complain though. Hearty is excellent, even in the dying throes of summer with sultry air dotted by violent thunderstorms. It’s not exactly soup weather, but when you’re TH, any weather is soup weather.
Overall, I would do this recipe again in a heartbeat. Maybe I don’t have the heat on the sausage brown up too high, and perhaps I let the potatoes go a little less before adding in the kale and cream. However, I actually thought that the alterations to the appearance and texture made it even more appealing. Your mileage will vary, obviously, but I think this is something you should try to make at home if you’re a fan of the Olive Garden’s stalwart soup like I am and love making good shit to eat.
Or “pasta fazool” if you pronounce it like a real live Italian-American, ah madone!!!
The starches in the potato leaching out combine with the water in the stock to create a slurry of its own, but that’s just science, daddy-o.