Pasta Fagioli Recipe | Classic Italian Soup

Pasta fagioli is the soup Italian cooks made when there was almost nothing in the house: a handful of small pasta, a jar of beans, whatever vegetables were softening in the bottom of the basket, and enough tomato to bind it all together. Pasta fagioli is peasant food in the most literal sense, and it is still one of the best things you can put in a bowl on a cold Tuesday.

This version leans toward the Italian American side of the family. There is ground beef in it, two kinds of beans instead of one, and a tomato broth thick enough to coat the ditalini. Thirty-five minutes start to finish, one pot, and it feeds six people for the price of a takeaway pizza.

What Is Pasta Fagioli?

The name means pasta and beans, which is exactly what it is. Every Italian region has its own version of pasta fagioli, and almost none of them agree with each other. Veneto makes it thick and often pureed. Down in Naples it is looser, with tomato and a lot of black pepper. Italian American kitchens picked up ground beef and celery somewhere along the way, which is the version most people in the United States have actually eaten.

What holds every pasta fagioli together is the ratio. Beans and pasta both need to be there in real quantity, and the liquid is a sauce more than a broth. If you can float a spoon on it, you have made it right. If it looks like a thin vegetable soup that happens to have beans in it, you have added too much stock.

You will also see it written pasta e fagioli, or spoken as pasta fazool, which is how the Neapolitan pronunciation came through Ellis Island. They are the same dish. Nobody in an Italian home has ever corrected anybody over it, whatever the internet says.

The soup is genuinely cheap to make, and that is not an accident. Beans were the protein people could afford, and a cup of dried pasta stretched a pot to feed a family. The Bean Institute has a good breakdown of what makes beans nutritionally useful, and it explains why a bowl of this leaves you full for hours rather than an hour.

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Ingredient Notes

• Ground beef. One pound, and eighty-five percent lean is the sweet spot. Leaner than that and the broth loses the richness that makes this feel like dinner. Drain the fat after browning, but do not rinse the pan.
• Onion, carrot and celery. The Italian soffritto, and the reason the soup tastes like it simmered all afternoon. Dice them roughly the size of the beans so every spoonful gets a bit of each.
• Garlic. Three cloves, minced, added after the vegetables rather than with them. Garlic burns in half the time an onion takes to soften, and burnt garlic turns the whole pot bitter.
• Canned diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. Both, not one or the other. The diced tomatoes give you texture and bright acidity, and the sauce gives the broth its body.
• Beef broth. Four cups. Vegetable broth works, though beef broth is what gives pasta fagioli its familiar depth.
• Cannellini and red kidney beans. One can of each. Cannellini go creamy and thicken the broth, and kidney beans stay firm. Rinse both, or the canning liquid tastes faintly metallic.
• Ditalini. One cup of the little tubes. Small shells or elbows work too. The pasta has to be small enough to fit on a spoon with a bean and a piece of carrot.
• Dried herbs. Basil, oregano and parsley, dried rather than fresh, because they go in early and need to bloom in the fat.
• Parmesan. Grated over each bowl, not stirred into the pot, so it melts into strands on contact with the hot soup.

Pasta Fagioli vs Minestrone

Pasta fagioli and minestrone get confused constantly, and the difference is real. Minestrone is a vegetable soup that happens to contain some pasta and some beans. The vegetables are the point, the list is long and seasonal, and the broth is thin enough to drink.

Pasta fagioli is a bean and pasta dish that happens to be wet. There are usually three vegetables, no more, and they exist to season the base rather than to be eaten in their own right. The liquid is thick, the starch from the beans and the pasta does most of the thickening, and a portion is a meal instead of a first course.

The practical consequence is timing. You can simmer minestrone for an hour and it only improves. Simmer this one that long after the pasta goes in and you will have a very good bean stew with no pasta left in it, because the tubes will have dissolved into the broth.

How To Make Pasta Fagioli

First, brown the beef. Heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat, add the ground beef, and break it up with a wooden spoon. Let it sit undisturbed for a minute at a time so it browns rather than steams. Tip off the excess fat.

Next, soften the vegetables. Add the diced onion, carrot and celery straight into the pot with the beef. Seven to eight minutes over medium heat, until the onion is translucent and the carrot has lost its raw crunch. Stir in the garlic and give it thirty seconds, no longer.

Then, build the broth. Pour in the beef broth, the diced tomatoes with all their juice, the tomato sauce, the herbs, salt, pepper and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Bring it to a gentle simmer and leave it uncovered for twenty minutes, because that is how the broth reduces and concentrates.

After that, cook the pasta separately. Boil the ditalini in well-salted water until it is just al dente, then drain it.

Finally, bring the pasta fagioli together. Stir the drained pasta and both cans of rinsed beans into the pot and simmer for three minutes, long enough to heat everything through. Taste, adjust the salt, and ladle it out with parmesan over the top.

How To Tell When the Soup Is Ready

Pasta fagioli tells you when it is ready if you drag a spoon across the surface. The broth should close behind it slowly rather than instantly, which tells you the starch has done its work and the liquid has reduced enough. A carrot cube should give completely under gentle pressure with no chalky center.

Taste a spoonful of the broth on its own, without a bean or a piece of pasta in it. If it tastes flat, it needs salt rather than more herbs, and it will need more salt than you expect because the beans and the pasta are both unseasoned. If it tastes sharp, a pinch of sugar rounds off the canned tomato.

Make It Ahead

Pasta fagioli was built for making ahead, with one rule. Cook the base through the twenty-minute simmer, cool it, and refrigerate it without the pasta. It keeps four days that way and the flavor deepens noticeably overnight.

Boil fresh ditalini the day you serve it, and stir it into the reheated base. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a soup that tastes freshly made and one that tastes reheated. Beans can go in with the base, since they hold their shape perfectly well.

If you are cooking for a weeknight, the whole soffritto step can be done on a Sunday. Soften the onion, carrot and celery, cool them, and keep them in the fridge in a sealed container for up to three days.

Storing Pasta Fagioli

Leftover pasta fagioli keeps in the fridge for four days in an airtight container. It thickens considerably, because the pasta keeps drinking the broth even when it is cold. Loosen each portion with a splash of broth or water as you reheat it, and do it over low heat rather than in the microwave if you want the beans to stay whole.

Freezing works well, again with the pasta left out. Freeze the base in portions for up to three months and thaw overnight in the fridge. Frozen and thawed pasta goes mushy and gray, and there is no fixing it, so boil a fresh cup when you reheat the batch.

The parmesan is a serving garnish, not a storage ingredient. Cheese stirred into a pot that then sits in the fridge separates into rubbery threads on reheating, so keep the block and grate it fresh each time.

Variations and Substitutions

Meatless. Leave out the beef, use vegetable broth, and add a third can of beans. Start with two tablespoons of olive oil rather than one so the soffritto still has fat to cook in, and finish with a parmesan rind dropped into the simmer.

Italian sausage. Swap the ground beef for sweet or hot Italian sausage squeezed out of its casings. It brings fennel and mild chile heat with it and needs no extra seasoning at all.

Pancetta. Two ounces diced and rendered before the beef goes in is the most traditional route, and it is worth doing if you have it.

Greens. A few handfuls of spinach, kale or chopped escarole stirred in during the last two minutes. Escarole is the classic Neapolitan choice and it holds its texture better than spinach does.

Thicker. Mash half a cup of the cannellini beans against the side of the pot before you add the rest. The starch releases straight into the broth and thickens it without any flour.

Rosemary and a bay leaf. Both are traditional in northern versions. Add them with the broth and pull the bay leaf out before serving.

Slow cooker. Brown the beef and vegetables on the stove first, then transfer everything except the pasta and beans to a slow cooker for four hours on low. Stir the beans and cooked pasta in at the end.

What to Serve with This Italian Soup

Bread with pasta fagioli is not optional. Serve a crusty loaf torn rather than sliced, or garlic bread if the table skews younger. Half the pleasure of this soup is the last few spoonfuls of thick broth mopped up with the crust.

Beyond that, keep it simple. A sharp green salad with a lemon dressing cuts the richness, and a plate of olives and pickled peppers on the table gives people something acidic to reach for between bowls. Anything heavier competes with the soup instead of supporting it.

If you are feeding a crowd and want a second dish, something baked and cheesy sits well next to it. An Italian sausage soup makes a good comparison if you want to see how a lighter broth behaves, and a plate of Pasta Da Vinci covers the people at the table who wanted a cream sauce.

Pasta Fagioli FAQ

More Questions About Italian Soups

If you like the idea of a soup that costs almost nothing and eats like a full dinner, an easy pastina soup runs on the same logic with even fewer ingredients, and a Crockpot Olive Garden chicken pasta takes the same restaurant flavors in a creamier direction.