Soups are ridiculously easy to make, essentially being hot, soothing water filled with whatever healthy vegetables, meat, or meat-substitutes you want to add into it.
As you can guess, it’s a great way to easily add plenty of healthiness and nutrition into your diet, as well as simply being a lovely and warm treat to have on a chilly evening.
One of the best ways to really bulk up your soup with nutritional value is through adding beans, such as the filling and hearty white bean.
These beans are especially high in fiber and protein, which will really do you favors.
In our simple recipe below, we’re going to show you how to fix up your own mouth-watering Tuscan white bean soup, packed with healthy white beans and delicious vegetables.
It’s a supremely quick meal, making it perfect for a low-effort but high-reward dinner, and we’ve got all the steps you’ll need. Read on!
How Are White Beans Good For You?
Before we get into the recipe for the delicious Tuscan white bean soup itself, it’s worth looking at what makes it such a healthy meal in the first place (see also “12 Delicious Linzer Torte Recipes You’ll Love“).
One of the key factors is the white beans we’re using, which are cannellini beans.
For a start, cannellini beans are packed full of protein, which is an especially important nutrient for your body.
This is because it’s an essential part of the process that gives you energy, as well as being important in its ability to help your body make cells and repair old ones.
On top of that, protein also helps growth for young people and pregnant women.
Cannellini beans are also packed with fiber, which really helps you with your digestion abilities.
Additionally, lots of fiber makes you feel fuller from a meal, as well as putting you at less risk of various diseases.
Thirdly, cannellini beans will give you plenty of carbohydrates, which are the main source of energy for your body.
These will help to fuel all the important parts of your body, such as the brain, central nervous system, heart muscles, and more.
And if that wasn’t enough? Cannellini beans also provide you with B vitamins, vitamin K, and vitamin E, as well as iron and potassium.
Oh, and they’re low in sugar! That’s right, this white bean soup is practically nothing but health.
What’s Great About Tuscan White Bean Soup?
There are loads of reasons that this Tuscan white bean soup is a great meal for you to fix up in the evening.
For a start, the white beans provide you with essential fiber and protein. The recipe uses cannellini beans, which are high in both fiber and protein, which can help with digestion and repairing cells, among other things.
On top of that, the meal is incredibly easy to make. This delicious Tuscan white bean soup is great for a low-effort, last-minute meal on a cold evening, because it takes just ten minutes to prepare and then a further twenty to cook.
It’s great for a family meal, too! Our recipe will give your four servings, but if you want to feed even more mouths then you can simply increase the amount of the key ingredients.
It’s delicious! This Tuscan white bean soup is full of flavor, as well as being packed with healthy goodness.
What Do You Need To Make Tuscan White Bean Soup?
In order to make the delicious Tuscan white bean soup, you’ll admittedly need quite a range of ingredients.
However, many of these are healthy vegetables that won’t be hard to get hold of, and they’ll make such a difference to the meal that it’s worth it.
Better still, though there may be quite a handful of ingredients, it doesn’t take any time at all to actually use them! The soup shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to prepare.
Ingredients
Cannellini beans – these are the white beans of the title, and they’re packed with fiber, protein, carbohydrates, and more! Additionally, if you’re using dry beans then you’ll need to pre-cook the beans before using them in the soup.
A carrot
Shallots
Celery
Kale
Vegetable broth – it’s best to get a low-sodium vegetable broth, because it will reduce your sodium intake.
Rosemary
Olive oil
Herbs de Provence – alternatively, you can use dried oregano or thyme if it’s easier.
Garlic
Red chili flakes
How Do You Make Tuscan White Bean Soup?
One of the big benefits of this warming and hearty Tuscan white bean soup, besides its healthiness, is that it’s very quick and easy to prepare.
You’ll find a step by step guide to making it below, with easy to follow instructions.
Pre-Cooking Dry Beans
Before we get into the proper steps, you’ll need to pre-cook your cannellini beans if you’re using dry ones. This is because uncooked dry beans will soak up the liquid of your soup, which will ruin the meal!
In order to cook dry beans, place them in a large pot and then cover the beans with water. Bring the whole thing to a boil, then lower the amount of heat and cover with water again.
Now simmer the beans gently, waiting until the point that they become tender and firm.
Pre-cooking dry beans can take a while, but is essential if you want to use them for the soap.
Alternatively, simply use a can of cannellini beans, because then you won’t need to pre-cook them beforehand.
Step One: Browning Garlic And Shallots
The first step in making your delicious Tuscan white bean soup is to brown both the garlic and the shallots. As you can guess, this simply means cooking them lightly until they begin to turn brown.
Finely chop your shallots, then chop your cloves of garlic too. Pour some oil into a pot and put the heat on, then add your garlic and shallots to the pot too, putting it on a medium heat.
If you have the heat too high, then the shallots will go far too brown.
Once the garlic and shallots both begin to look translucent, move onto the next step.
Step Two: Adding Carrots And Celery
You’re going to be adding your carrot slice and celery into the mix next, so make sure they’re prepared first.
You’ll want your large carrot to be cut into slices, and have the same done for your large stalk of celery.
Carefully pour the slices into your pan, then mix all of the vegetables together, turning the heat slightly higher to a medium-high level.
Do this for about five or six minutes, waiting for the vegetables to all turn tender.
Step Three: Adding The White Beans
Now it’s time to add the cannellini beans. If you’re using dried ones, then you’ll need to have pre-cooked them beforehand, following our instructions from earlier.
On the other hand, you can use cannellini beans instead, where you won’t have to pre-cook them earlier.
With canned cannellini beans, you need to instead pour them into a sieve and drain the liquid from them, then rinse the beans.
Once they’re drained and rinsed properly, add them into your pot with the rest of the vegetables. On top of that, add a sprig of rosemary into the mix too, leaving the rosemary with its leaves intact.
Step Four: Adding The Vegetable Broth
After that, it’s time to add in the vegetable broth.
We recommend that you buy a vegetable broth that is low in sodium, because it’s important to keep your daily sodium intake to the limit – which is no more than 2300 mg each day.
This may sound easy, but that figure is equal to about a teaspoon of table salt, so if you eat plenty of other salty things then it’s especially important to keep the sodium intake low here.
Add your vegetable broth into your pot’s mixture, then bring it all to a boil. After that, lower the heat so that it’s not only at a low level.
Leave the mixture to simmer on this low heat for about fifteen minutes.
Step Five: Blending And Remixing
In order to really get the soup texture that you’re going to want, you’re now going to blend part of the soup and then remix into the rest of the mixture.
To begin with, remove the sprig of rosemary, then transfer around ⅓ of the soup into a blender. Switch the blender on and blend this part of the mixture until it has gone creamy and smooth – delicious!
Now switch the blender off and pour that new smooth mixture back into your pot where the other ⅔s are still waiting. After that, mix it all together thoroughly.
Step Six: Adding The Kale
Once it’s all mixed together again, giving it all a great balance of creaminess and lumpiness, you want to add the kale into the mix too.
Once added, keep mixing the whole thing together until the bits of kale have wilted.
Step Seven: Serving
And that’s it! You’ve not got a nutritious and delicious Tuscan white bean soup, with plenty of healthy ingredients and some wonderfully-filling cannellini beans.
It’s now time to serve the soup up, pouring it into as many bowls as you want, and perhaps getting some crusty bread to dip into it.
However, you might also want to add some garnishes to the top of your soup. For example, chopped parsley will add even more green to your soup, and give it a subtle edge of its peppery and clean taste.
Alternatively, you might want to add some red chili flakes onto the top. This can totally change the feel of the soup, making it extra hot and spicy.
Obviously, this won’t be to everyone’s taste! If you’re not somebody who can handle too much spice, then you won’t want to add any red chili flakes as a garnish to the soup.
What If You Want To Make The Soup Thicker?
Everybody loves a good, thick soup, because it makes the meal seem even more filling – as if that were possible!
However, if you want to make the Tuscan white bean soup thicker, then you can simply change up one of the earlier steps in our recipe.
In the fifth step, we recommended that you remove ⅓ of the soup and blend it, making it creamy and smooth, before adding it back into the rest of the soup and mixing it all together again.
However, if you want your soup to be even thicker, remove a whole half of the soup and put it into the blender, then blend it, before putting the half back in with the rest of the soup and thoroughly mixing it together.
This will give the soup a much thicker texture, which can really add to your enjoyment of the meal.
What Makes Tuscan White Bean Soup Healthy?
We’ve already covered the various health benefits that you get from the white beans (cannellini beans) used in this recipe, but what about the healthiness that comes from the wide range of other ingredients?
For a start, carrots contain calcium and vitamin K, both of which can help to strengthen people’s bones.
On top of that, they contain a good amount of fiber, which can help to keep blood sugar levels controlled, and vitamin A.
In addition to that, you’ll find that celery is a good source of essential antioxidants, such as vitamin C and beta carotene, among others.
On top of that, celery and its seeds can help to protect against inflammations that you might get in your body, while the vegetable is also handy for helping your digestion.
As for the kale that’s included in the delicious soup, kale is a fine source of fiber, calcium, vitamin C, vitamin K, iron, antioxidants, and much more.
How Healthy Is Tuscan White Bean Soup?
As you’ve seen, both the beans and the range of vegetables used in our Tuscan white bean soup are really healthy for you, with a wide variety of different nutrients and good stuff.
On the whole, you’ll find that the soup is especially full of fiber and protein, which can really help your health.
How packed, you ask? Well, in one serving of the Tuscan white bean soup, you’ll find 5.4g of fiber and 8g of protein.
It’s the cannellini beans that are especially packed with fiber and protein, so make sure you don’t cut them out of the recipe!
A typical adult will need about 25-35 grams of fiber each day, and this can be a part of your diet that gets you there.
On the other hand, a typical adult will need about 0.75g of protein each day for every kilo of body weight – which means around 55g of protein for the average man and 45g for the average woman.
How Do You Store The Tuscan White Bean Soup?
In case you’re unable to eat all of the Tuscan white bean soup in one go, or you want to save some for later so that you can enjoy it all across the week, then you’ll need to make sure that you store the soup properly.
If you don’t store the soup properly, it’ll lose flavor and go off.
In order to store it correctly, you’ll need to transfer the soup into a container that has a secure lid. Do this within two hours of making the soup, but make sure that it has fully cooled before you transfer it.
After that, make sure the container’s lid is tightly-secured, then put it into your refrigerator.
Once you’ve got the soup stored properly in your fridge, make sure you eat it within a week.
Tuscan White Bean Soup Recipe
Preparing Time: 10 minutes
Cooking Time: 20 minutes
Amount: 4 servings
Ingredients
A can of cannellini beans (19oz)
1 large carrot (chopped)
3 shallots (finely chopped)
1 large celery (chopped)
1 cup of kale (chopped, with stems taken off)
1 liter of vegetable broth (we recommend a low-sodium one)
1 sprig of rosemary
2 tablespoons of olive oil
½ a teaspoon of herbs de provence (alternatively, dried oregano or thyme will do)
2 cloves of garlic (chopped)
(Optional) ½ teaspoon of red chili flakes
Recipe
Pour olive oil into a pot and heat, then add shallots and cook for two minutes on medium heat.
After that, add garlic/ Cook for a further minute.
Add the celery and carrots, raising heat to medium-high and cooking for five minutes.
Add cannellini beans, herbs de provence, rosemary, and vegetable brother. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to low, simmering it for fifteen minutes. Add chili flakes, if wanted.
Transfer ⅓ to blender (removing rosemary), blend, then add back to soup and mix.
Add kale to mix, stirring it until it wilts.
Serving! Garnish if you want.
Final Thoughts
Tuscan white bean soup is delicious and healthy – follow our recipe!
Hi, my name is Justin Roberts and I like to live by one major rule in life – health is wealth. And where does all health stem from? The food choices we make.
I grew up in a not-so-wealthy household that often struggled to get food on the table.
The food we did eat was cheap, holding no nutritional value at all. I’m talking frozen foods, carbs, fats, and very little fresh produce.
I am fortunate enough to have made a life for myself where the money for food is no longer an issue, and I have spent the majority of it looking into healthy foods and different diets to try.
The most notable is keto and paleo. I am also interested in only using whole foods wherever possible – call it trauma!
As a professional chef, I now create recipes surrounding these diets every day. My family are my tasters, and I strive to make my recipes as budget-friendly as possible.
I hope that you’ll find some inspiration for healthier meals from my website. I want to create a catalog of recipes that you can come back to time and time again. Enjoy!
