Dehydrated Tomato and Bean Minestrone
A hearty, nourishing soup packed with flavour: perfect comfort food for those cold nights in camp!
Pasta, beans, a ton of vegetables and a herbed tomato base is great cold weather comfort food, and it’s also one vegetarian soup your carnivore friends are likely to enjoy. The pasta and beans provide plenty of energy, the parmesan boosts protein, and we also recommend adding a splash of olive oil to each serve for even more calories and mouthfeel. The tomato base is cooked out so it has a rich, roasted flavour with plenty of depth; those who like chilli can add even more punch!
The recipe below makes about sixteen 150g serves with 2,700kJ (645cal) per serve and 24g protein per serve (with 10ml olive oil and 20g parmesan added). Add more protein/calories by:
Using high protein pasta like San Remo Pasta Pro (an extra 16g of protein making 40g protein total per serve), or swap for any egg pasta.
Swapping out some of the pasta or veg for more beans, or just adding more beans
Swapping out some of the veg for more pasta
Using 20ml olive oil instead of 10ml (brings the meal to 733 cal per serve)
Increasing your serving size.
Ingredients*
The total energy value for our 16 serves is 37,800kJ (9,000cal), or 43,200kJ (10,300cal) with 10 ml olive oil per serve added in camp.
The ingredient list might seem long, but you add almost everything into one big pot, a few items at a time — only the pasta cooks separately. Easy-peasy!
*Fits a nine-tray Excalibur dehydrator.
2 tbspn olive oil
3 large onions diced
2 leeks sliced
3 large carrots finely diced
4 sticks celery finely diced
1 knob garlic chopped
200g mushrooms diced
1 large red capsicum diced
250g zucchini diced
6 chillies or to taste chopped (optional)
500g tomato paste
400 ml verjuice or dry white wine
1/4 cauliflower finely chopped
1/4 savoy cabbage finely sliced
160g green beans finely sliced
1 bunch tuscan black cabbage stripped and sliced (to give about 200g of leaf)
10g dried porcini or shittake mushrooms, soaked in boiling water to just cover
2 tbspn or to taste salt, msg or stock powder
1 1/2 tbspn dried oregano.
3 tbspn freshly ground black pepper
7 x 400g tins cannellini beans, drained and liquid reserved
1 kg smallish pasta or high protein pasta eg macaroni or ditalini
320g shelf stable parmesan
160ml olive oil extra, added in camp
optional: parmesan rind
Method
Heat the 2 tbspn of oil in a large heavy-based pot over medium high heat and saute onions, leek, mushroom, garlic, chilli (if using), carrot and celery, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom until vegetables are slightly softened and onion is translucent.
Add capsicum and, continuing to stir, cook for ten minutes or until beginning to caramelise. If your pot is smallish, do this in batches because otherwise the vegetables boil instead of caramelise.
Lower heat to medium and add tomato paste, scraping the bottom so the paste doesn’t catch too much. Continue to cook for another five minutes or until paste begins to darken and lose its rawness: cooked out paste should smell a bit like roasted tomato. Don’t worry if there are dark brown bits caught on the bottom of the pot: these add flavour.
Add verjuice and soaked dried mushrooms with their water. Increase heat to medium high and stir well, scraping bottom of pan to loosen the caramelised bits.
Add all remaining ingredients except pasta and cannellini beans.
Add reserved cannellini liquid to just cover all vegetables and stir well (top up with stock or water if necessary but add as little as possible). Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes or until vegetables are soft, stirring now and then.
Add cannellini beans, mix through gently, and cook another 10 minutes or until fully heated.
Place the vegetable mix into a large colander set over a wok or wide deep frypan and allow to drain, reserving liquid.
Transfer veg to a large bowl. Remove parmesan rind if used.
Meanwhile, cook pasta for about half the recommended cooking time. Drain immediately and mix with the drained vegetables in the large bowl.
If you want a serving size that’s just right for you, place one serve in a bowl, weigh (Wet weight A), then spread that serve (or exactly two serves ie Wet Weight 2A) on a mesh dehydrator tray marked with a teaspoon. Spread the rest of the vegetables onto dehydrator trays, reserving one ladle of vegetables.
Using a stick blender, blend the ladle of vegetables into the liquid in the wok (the beans and fibre help the dried leather powder more easily). Place the wok or pan with the drained vegetable juices and, stirring the bottom constantly, reduce over high heat until it reaches a thick, saucy, spreading consistency.
Boil sauce hard in a wide pan or wok, scraping bottom with a wooden spoon the entire time.
Lower heat as it thickens. A non-stick pan is ideal.
Next, spread sauce thinly onto silicone- or baking paper-lined dehydrator trays.
Sauce leather top tray and vegetable and pasta mix bottom tray, partway through drying.
Dehydrate everything at 57C (135F), regularly breaking up any vegetable clumps for even drying. When the vegetables are dry, remove your marked tray and weigh again. This will be Dry Weight B (or 2B if two serves). Place with all other dried vegetables in a large bowl ready for packaging.
Partway through drying, invert the sauce leather onto mesh and peel off the silicone or baking paper. Once dry, powder the leather in a spice grinder, spread powder on a silicone sheet and dry again for ten minutes to condition. Place powder in a bowl.
Sauce leather top left and powdered bottom right on a silicone sheet, ready for conditioning.
Packaging
Into each freezer, ziploc or vac seal bag, place dry weight B (or 2B for two serves; two serves for us is about 260g plus 40g parmesan).
An alternative method is to portion up the meals by calories. The total calorie count for the full recipe (excluding the parmesan and the extra Olive oil) is 7,550. Divide the total by the number of calories you want per meal, remembering you’ll be adding 10ml (or more) per serve of olive oil (ie an extra 80 calories per 10ml) and 20g per serve of parmesan in camp (92 calories), which both boost calories significantly.
Take your powdered sauce and distribute equally between your bags. Fold parmesan into greaseproof paper or a small ziploc and add it to your vac seal bag.
Vac and seal.
Label with date, name, weight and number of serves.
In Camp
Slit open bag and remove parmesan pack. Although most of our meals for two are rehydrated in the vac seal bag in a cosy with a measured amount of water, because it is a soup this one works well with the ingredients topped with cold water in our 1300ml pot for two, brought to the boil and then left for twenty minutes to finish rehydration in the pot cosy. Don’t dilute your soup too much: for us, about 1L per 260g vegetables (two serves) is about right.
Geoff cooking up a tomato and bean storm on the Larapinta Trail, our hot soup in the pot behind ready to be popped into its cosy to complete rehydrating.
Stir in olive oil (we use 10ml per serve), and sprinkle with parmesan. Bellissimo!
A welcome warming soup on a cold night, central Australia’s Larapinta Trail.
Cheat’s Clever Hacks
You can assemble most of this recipe with store bought and commercially dehydrated products. Combine:
dehydrated soup mix vegetables — not quite the same but will still taste good!
tiny instant soup pasta that doesn’t require par-cooking
tomato powder and/or minestrone soup powder sachets
freeze dried or fast-cooking dehydrated beans (not available in Oz, so you’ll still need to dehydrate the tinned beans)
