Wedding soup is a chicken broth-based soup whose primary flavor profile is from oregano, parsley, and parmesan cheese. It’s popular in the US and is one of my dad’s favorites, though we rarely ate it because of how salty the canned version could be.
Key Ingredients
Most of the ingredients in this soup are pretty standard meat and vegetable ingredients of a chicken soup, but there are 3 ingredients to be wary of in this recipe
Noodles
Wedding soup usually includes a pasta called orzo. Orzo looks like a rice grain but it’s wheat just like any other pasta. Other types of small pastas (“pasting”) used in this soup are acini de pepe (dot-shaped) or stelline (tiny star-shaped). There are gluten free variations of these, so it’s easy to replace. Otherwise, you can just substitute with rice, but it will lengthen the cooking time.
Parmesan cheese
Parmesan cheese is mixed into the meatballs themselves and the rind is often used to provide the soup with savoriness and saltiness. For a dairy-free version, we can actually replace the cheese with nutritional yeast, but it changes the cooking order. Rather than adding the cheese rind in the beginning, we’ll be sprinkling Nutritional Yeast at the end to get that savory “cheesy” taste.
Chicken bone broth
If you don’t do this already, I highly recommend making homemade bone broth as part of your kitchen basics routines. Homemade stock/broth is significantly tastier and pretty low-effort as long as you have a slow cooker.
Boxed broth is a fair alternative, but many broth variants have hidden corn. Look out for “natural flavor” or “vegetable stock” with unidentified ingredients. Broth is a food where corn is a highly likely ingredient in the broth. Bone broth is less likely to have it but it still can.
Making the Process Easier
While most recipes call for pre-cooking the meatballs either in the oven or by searing in a pan, this dish can be done in 1-pot by rolling and dropping the meatballs directly into the soup as it cooks. Pre-cooking the meatballs helps sear the flavors into the meatball better, but for a quick weekday meal, it’s perfectly fine and tasty to skip this step and cook the raw meatballs directly in the broth for a faster weekday meal.
Healthy Substitutions
The traditional recipe calls for meatballs made of 1/2 ground pork and 1/2 ground beef, but TBH I always make this with ground turkey or ground chicken for a lighter meal. I’ve also mixed in 1/2 cup sweet potato puree instead of almond flour for the heck of it, but that does sweeten the meatballs a bit. If you don’t care about authenticity, there’s a lot of variation you can do.
Italian Wedding Soup (Gluten Free, Dairy Free)
Equipment
- 1 Pot at least 3 quart capacity
Ingredients
Meatballs
- 1/2 lb ground pork can replace with ground turkey
- 1/2 lb ground beef can replace with ground turkey
- 3 tbsp almond flour
- 2 tbsp dried parsley
- 2 tsp dried oregano
- 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- 1 egg
Soup
- 1 cup diced onion
- 1 tbsp minced garlic
- 1 cup diced carrots
- 6 cups chicken broth
- 1/2 cup orzo or other tiny pasta, such as stelline
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1/2 tsp salt to taste
- 1/2 tsp tumeric optional, for color
- 3 cups chopped spinach
Instructions
Make the Meatballs
- Add all the meatball ingredients into a bowl and, using your hands, mix it all together until fully incorporated. Set aside.
Make the Soup
- In a heavy bottom pot, heat olive oil on medium heat and add diced onions and sauté until softened.
- Add the garlic and diced carrots and continue to sweat the vegetables, about 3-5 minutes.
- Add the chicken broth and turn the heat to high to bring to a boil.
- As the chicken broth starts to heat, wet your hands and start rolling small meatballs from the meat mixture, dropping them into the soup 1 at a time. As the broth heats, it will cook the meatballs and cause them to float to the top.
- Once boiling, add the orzo, and stir frequently to prevent the noodles from sticking to the bottom as they cook. Cook for 10 minutes.
- Add the nutritional yeast, salt, and tumeric. Add the spinach and stir until wilted. Turn off heat.
- You can serve immediately, but I recommend waiting 20 minutes for the noodles to expand and get softer. Some reason it tastes better this way in this soup.
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