Lentil Soup · Benedetta Rossi

Tip the 400 g of lentils into a sieve and rinse them under cold running water for a good 30 seconds, turning them with your hand.

💡 Rinsing is not fussiness. Dried lentils carry field dust and the occasional small stone; it is also worth glancing over them in the sieve while you rinse.

Shake them dry, put them in a large pot and pour over the 1.5 litres of water.

💡 There is no soaking step in this recipe — small Italian lentils do not need it. Do not soak them overnight or they will fall apart inside 20 minutes.

Bring to the boil over high heat, then lower it to a gentle simmer and cook for about 40 minutes, uncovered.

💡 Skim off any grey foam that rises in the first few minutes — it is starch and dust, and leaving it makes the broth cloudy.

After about 30 minutes, add a little coarse salt to the lentil pot and stir.

💡 Late salting is deliberate. Salt from the start firms the skins and drags the cooking out; wait until the lentils are nearly soft and they season through in the remaining ten minutes.

While the lentils finish, get on with the sauce. Finely chop the celery, carrot and onion together into a small dice.

💡 Chop them small — 3–4 mm. This sauce only cooks for a few minutes, so anything bigger will still be crunchy when it goes into the soup.

Warm a thread of olive oil in a small pan over medium-low heat, add the chopped vegetables and, if you want it, the chilli.

💡 Medium-LOW. The point of a sofrito is to sweat vegetables until sweet, not to brown them — browned onion turns the finished soup slightly bitter.

Cook gently for 6–8 minutes, stirring now and then, until the onion has gone translucent and lost its raw edge.

Pour in the 400 g of tomato passata, then stir in the half teaspoon of tomato concentrate and a pinch of fine salt.

💡 Half a teaspoon of concentrate seems pointless next to 400 g of passata — it is not. It is pure reduced tomato, and it gives the sauce a savoury weight passata alone never has.

Simmer the sauce for 4–5 minutes, until it darkens slightly and stops looking watery.

Back at the lentil pot: they are done when a lentil crushes easily against the roof of your mouth with no chalky centre. If some cooking water is left and you like a thick soup, ladle a few spoonfuls of it out.

💡 Keep whatever you ladle out in a mug. It is well-seasoned lentil broth, and it is the right thing to loosen the soup with tomorrow when it has thickened in the fridge.

Pour the tomato sauce into the lentils, stir it right through and leave the pot on a low flame for just a few more minutes so the two come together.

💡 Only a few minutes. Boil the tomato hard into the lentils and their edges start breaking down — you want soup with whole lentils in it, not lentil purée.

Taste and correct the salt one pinch at a time, then turn off the heat.

Ladle into bowls, finish each with a thread of olive oil and lay a small sprig of rosemary on top.

💡 The rosemary is a garnish, laid on at the end — it is never boiled in. Its oils are volatile, so it perfumes the bowl as the steam rises past it and does not turn the soup medicinal.