Lemony Sausage and Escarole Soup

Hi, I'm Mary Nolan with Bon Appetit,

and today I'm gonna be making

a lemony sausage and escarole soup.

I love this soup because it really is a one-pot meal,

you have your protein, your greens,

and it's really easy to put together.

So I'm gonna start with my soup pot on high,

and then to that I'm gonna add about a teaspoon of oil.

And then I'm gonna start browning my sausage.

Regular, mild, Italian sausage

that I've taken out of the casing,

and I'm just gonna break it up with my spoon.

You wanna hear it sizzle when it goes into the pot.

First I just wanna break up those pieces as much as I can.

We're gonna use that fat that's rendered

from the sausage to cook our onion next.

I'm gonna add just a little more oil,

stir that up with the sausage.

So my onions had a chance to soften up.

I've scraped up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.

That's gonna give really nice flavor to the soup,

and now I'm gonna add my orzo.

This is a cup of orzo, and I just wanna stir it around,

and coat it with all of that delicious flavor,

and then next I'm gonna add my Swanson chicken broth.

It's already seasoned,

so my soup is gonna have really nice flavor.

So I'm just gonna pour this in.

My orzo is gonna cook as the soup simmers,

so you wanna make sure you have enough liquid,

because that orzo is gonna get

a little bit bigger as it cooks.

So I'll go ahead and add a pinch of red pepper flake.

You can add more, but this is about a quarter teaspoon,

if you like it a little spicier.

And then my lemon, so I'm gonna use the zest and the juice,

and go ahead and put it in your pan.

So once this comes to a simmer, I'm gonna add my escarole.

I love escarole, it's one of my favorite greens.

You can eat it raw, you can eat it cooked.

Once this is simmering, we're gonna stir that in.

I'm gonna bump up my heat a little bit.

All right, so my soup is simmering.

I'm gonna go ahead and add my escarole,

and just let it cook down a little bit.

The longer you let it cook,

it is gonna lose some of that bright green, beautiful color.

I'm gonna go ahead and juice a lemon

to add a little bit of flavor, and I'm gonna taste it also,

because you never serve something that you haven't tasted.

Words to live by.

Because once the soup is already in everyone's bowl,

and you're like, ah, I wish I just would've

added a little more salt, or a little more lemon juice,

it's kinda too late at that point.

I'm already loving the way this looks.

It's so good, I don't think it needs any more lemon juice.

I think it's perfect just the way it is,

so I'm just gonna let it simmer for a few more minutes,

let that escarole break down a little bit,

and then it's time to eat.

All right, the time has come to eat our soup.

We tasted it, I thought the seasoning tasted spot on,

so now I'm just going to ladle some up.

I always like to make sure I go to the bottom of the pot

so you get a little bit of all that goodness,

the sausage, the orzo, the escarole,

and then I do a little brothy bit from the top.

And you wanna do that for every bowl

so that everybody gets a little bit of everything.

It's so good, so hot, spicy in the best way.

It's really balanced.

I love Swanson chicken broth

because it has really rich flavor,

and it's already seasoned so there's very little

that I have to do to make this soup delicious.

This would be really delicious

with some grilled bread, or garlic bread even,

something to help sop up all those delicious flavors.