Italian Sausage, Cabbage & White Bean Soup (Recipe)

This is an excellent soup, delicious and packed full of nourishing ingredients!

Great any time of the year, it is especially suited to the cold winter months because it takes advantage of readily available wintertime staples.

As a bonus, the soup comes together fairly quickly with a relatively short cooking time.

One Straw Ranch Italian Sausage is the foundation of this flavorful soup. We use regular Italian sausage because our children prefer a less spicy meal, but the Spicy Italian sausage is also delicious if your taste buds are accustomed to a little more kick.

You can also adjust the heat of this recipe by omitting the red pepper flakes (which we do for our small Farmhands) – or increasing the quantity.

**To give this soup extra nutritional power, make it with homemade bone broth. Click here for our bone broth tutorial. Or try making quick All Purpose Bare Bones Broth instead.**

The recipe is written for chicken broth, but pork bone broth can be used just as well.

Whatever broth/stock you use, make sure that you love the flavor because with this quick cooking soup the broth is highly influential on the final outcome!

In this recipe, the vegetables are cooked in the oil that renders out from browning the sausage.  Pork fat is highly nutritious, including Vitamin D which we all need more of this time of year, and adds so much flavor to the finished soup!

I am sharing this recipe with you today with gratitude to my Auntie B, a wonderful and generous cook, who first brought us a pot of this delicious soup.

Upon quickly devouring the whole batch, I immediately asked for the recipe!

With her permission I have made some modifications to suite my preferred ingredients and cooking style and now share it with you.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Italian Sausage, Cabbage & White Bean Soup

Ingredients

1 T olive oil

1 lb OSR Italian Sausage (regular or spicy)

1 small head cabbage, chopped (about 1.5 lbs)

1 ½ C onion, diced

2 T lemon juice

½ tsp salt *

½ tsp black pepper

4-5 cloves garlic, minced

¼ tsp crushed red pepper flakes (optional)**

¾ tsp dried rosemary

2 bay leaves

4 C chicken broth (or homemade pork broth, recipes linked above)

1 ½ C cooked white beans (or 1 15 oz can, drained)

½ C heavy cream (optional)

Directions

Heat the oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking it up and stirring occasionally, until cooked through and some of the pieces are starting to turn golden brown. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the cooked sausage to a bowl and set side. Leave the oil in the pan.

Add the cabbage, onion, lemon juice, salt and pepper to the pot. Cover and cook about 10 minutes until the cabbage and onions start to soften. Stir occasionally and turn the heat down a bit if necessary so the vegetables don’t brown.

Add the garlic, red pepper flakes (optional) and rosemary and cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add the bay leaves, broth, and sausage. Turn heat up to medium-high, bring to a boil, cover, turn the heat down to simmer, and cook until the vegetables are tender – about 15 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Add the beans and cook an additional 5 minutes to heat through.

Taste for seasonings and add additional salt and pepper as desired.

For a creamy soup, remove from heat and stir in the heavy cream. For a lighter broth soup, omit the cream. The photo shows the soup with the cream omitted.

Remove bay leaves and serve, garnished with additional red pepper flakes as desired.

*There is salt in the sausage and possibly the broth, depending on the broth you use. If you prefer your soup less salty, omit the salt until the final “taste for seasonings” step.

** Our young children tell us that even the ¼ tsp of red pepper flakes makes the soup too spicy. A little goes a long way in this soup!

Click here to order Italian Sausage.