cabbage soup with orzo + sausage
Italian culture as a whole, particularly when it comes to cooking, is very anti-waste: you work with what you have, finding its usefulness through ingenuity. Fresh produce makes this easy—summer tomatoes at peak ARE luxury, all by themselves; early fall mushrooms feel like a celebration. But in deep fall and winter, when all the fun produce disappears and all that’s left are stubborn brassicas, that ingenuity has to increase further if you want to create any kind of transcendence. As a result, Italian winter cooking is true minimalist alchemy, an art form of coaxing extravagance out of the few humble components strong enough to survive cold storage.
Cabbage is a huge part of Italian countryside cooking, specifically savoy cabbage, called cavolo verza in Italian. Where green cabbage can be a little leathery and tough, savoy cabbage has the lacy leaves of napa cabbage: loosely packed and tender inside (read: easy to cut, unlike some cabbages I know), with a dramatic frilly texture on the outside. Braised in this soup, it does lose a lot of that raw glamour, but what it gains in exchange is a soft silkiness that feels like a blanket in a bowl.
The finished soup here is almost a riff on Italian Wedding, with chunks of sausage, soft greens, and small noodles in a harmonious union not unlike a marriage. It’s fast to throw together, and can handle a few hours on the stove by itself. Even the cabbage core gets to find its higher purpose here, making this soup virtually waste-free. A great choice for that fall “back to routine” reset craving one gets to be a more practical, healthier person with a simpler, more substantive lifestyle that hits right around, you know, September 19th.
RECIPE
Just a cozy, simple, put-it-on-the-stove-and-ignore-it Tuscan-inspired Italian cabbage soup for back-to-routine healthy-eating aspirations.
Effortful time: 20 minutes
Total time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Makes 8 medium-sized bowls
YOU NEED
~1 1/2-2 lb head of Savoy cabbage, other green cabbages (including Napa) will work if you can’t find it
1 lb mild Italian sausage: pork, chicken, or Beyond; I use pork for this soup
1 tbsp olive oil
4 large cloves garlic, minced
10 cups chicken broth
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp onion powder
1 cup orzo or other small soup noodle, like perlini
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
Salt and freshly cracked pep, to taste
Parm, always
MAKE IT
Process your cabbage. Peel off any dry outer leaves and remove the core. Very finely chop the core and set aside. Cut the remaining cabbage into wedges (how many depends on the size of your cabbage; I did six). Then, starting from one of the narrow ends and cutting horizontally up the wedge, slice the cabbage into thin ribbons. It is going to look like A LOT of cabbage.
Prep your other ingredients. Mince your garlic and prepare your chicken broth.
Brown the sausages. In a very large Dutch oven or soup pot (7-8 qt), heat the oil until shimmering. Slice open the sausages if they are cased and brown the meat, crumbling with a spoon or spatula as you go.
Cook the cabbage cores. After 3 minutes, add the cabbage cores. Sauté this for another 5 minutes, until the sausage has browned into the pot and the cabbage cores are beginning to soften.
Fry the garlic. Once the sausage is fully cooked and finely crumbled, scoot the whole pile of sausage/cores aside add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds more until fragrant.
Deglaze your pot. Pour in a splash of the chicken broth and turn the heat down low before scraping up any brown bits into your stock; this also stops the garlic from overcooking.
Wilt the cabbage. Add the cabbage ribbons in batches, stirring to quickly begin the wilting process. It will look like too much to fit, but I promise it will. This takes about 5 minutes; the cabbage should start to look glossy and soften slightly as you go.
Build the soup and simmer. Once all the cabbage is incorporated, add the rest of your broth, onion powder, oregano, a pinch of salt, and pepper. Simmer on low, uncovered, for at least 35-40 minutes.
Add the orzo. By this time, the soup will have reduced a bit and the cabbage will be very soft and braised. Add the orzo and cook for the length on the package.
Finish with a hit of acid. When the orzo is cooked, squeeze in the lemon juice and give it all a good stir. Ladle into bowls with shaved parm, a drizzle of olive oil, and fresh pepper.
Note
In true peasant tradition, this soup is at its best after reheating once. Add 1-2 cups of additional broth or water when you do, as the orzo will suck it up overnight.