This Copycat Zuppa Toscana Recipe Is Way Better Than Olive Garden’s

I have spent less than an hour of my life inside an Olive Garden, and it was on my one and only visit last year to the restaurant to try their “zuppa toscana,” a customer favorite I’d heard about for ages but until that moment had never eaten. I have spent significantly more of my life in Tuscany itself, including several months working on a farm in the Maremma Valley. I also worked for several years as the sous chef to one of the world’s authorities on Tuscan cooking, Cesare Casella, at his former NYC restaurant Beppe.

I can confidently say that I know a fair amount about Tuscan soups and how to make them. I have plenty of experience with the region’s famed bread and bean soups, such as acquacotta, ribollita, pappa al pomodoro, and oh so many chickpea stews, not to mention Tuscan classics like the seafood-packed cacciucco that most folks in the States couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Most Americans, however, probably can identify Olive Garden’s zuppa toscana, despite it not being a soup almost any Tuscan would recognize. So that’s why I finally went to taste it; it may not be “real” Tuscan food, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good.

Was it good? I can confidently say that the zuppa toscana was the best thing by far that I sampled at the restaurant. But that isn’t saying much. The soup was tasty and filling, but it was missing the kind of soulful touch that could make it great. None of its components blended, not in flavor and not in texture, in the way they should in this kind of dish. The important thing, though, is that the concept behind the soup is solid—its combination of sausage, kale, and potato in a lightly creamy broth can and should be great.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how to nudge it in an even better direction—one that’s richer, more flavorful, and more integrated, with all the elements coming together in unified harmony. The fennel-tinged pork sausage should infuse the broth with flavor and fat; the kale should be generous and tender; the potatoes should half-fade into the broth, thickening it naturally while leaving behind rounded little nubbins that melt in your mouth; the broth should be richer and creamier without crossing over into overwhelmingly heavy territory; and the whole thing should be quietly vibrating with chile heat, either from red chile flakes, spicy sausage, or both.

Done well, it’s a one-pot meal that fills the belly while blanketing you with a reassuring feeling of safety and comfort.

The Secrets to Better Olive Garden–Style Zuppa Toscana

Step 1: Steal Your Colleague’s Recipe

As I sat eating the zuppa toscana at Olive Garden, my mind was noting specific details and assembling a theory of the recipe that would capture those details but make them even better. Slowly though, a feeling was growing in me that I had eaten this soup recently, and then it hit me: Genevieve’s recent creamy tortellini soup recipe—her take on Reddit’s “upvote” soup—is almost identical to Olive Garden’s zuppa toscana with just a few critical alterations. Those are:

• Upvote soup has tortellini, zuppa toscana does not.
• Upvote soup is tinged red with tomato paste and has orange ingredients like carrot; zuppa toscana is much whiter, no tomato or carrot in sight.
• Upvote soup is thickened with cream and flour, while zuppa toscana seems to be thickened with cream and potato starch (though it’s possible Olive Garden’s proprietary recipe calls for other supplementary thickeners).

I’m a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. I knew that Genevieve’s upvote soup recipe had the basic building blocks for zuppa toscana, and I knew from eating Genevieve’s soup that it was really good. My mission, then (I’m not ashamed to admit) was not to create a new recipe from scratch, but to adapt Genevieve’s recipe, working with her same basic ratios and steps while making the necessary adjustments to produce an improved copycat zuppa toscana instead of an improved upvote soup.

Some of the key steps in Genevieve’s original recipe that I maintain here include:

• Browning the sausage and rendering its fat. This builds flavor via the Maillard reaction while producing delicious sausage-flavored fat to infuse the soup.
• Cooking onions, celery, fennel, and garlic in the sausage fat. These aromatics form the flavor base of the soup, and by sautéing them in the sausage fat, we get a jump start on integrating the flavors.
• Blooming spices like fennel seed and chile flakes in the fat while the aromatics cook. Many flavor molecules, as well as the capsaicin that gives chiles their heat, are fat-soluble, so frying these dry ingredients in the sausage fat with the aromatics more fully draws out their flavor and spice and infuses it into the soup.

All of this formed the foundation of the soup. With a few additional tweaks, I’d be set.

Step 2: Use “Grandma’s” Potato Method

I’ve written about this method of preparing potatoes before: It involves cutting off irregular chunks from the potato, in zuppa toscana’s case a russet (leave the peel on if you want to do it exactly like Olive Garden, or peeled if that appeals more…let’s ignore that pun and move along). Those irregular chunks vary slightly in size and have angular edges and tapered points.

This accomplishes an important effect in a soup like this: The thinner, pointer, and smaller bits of potato cook faster than the larger, wider pieces. With enough stirring, those overcooked parts of the potato slough off into the soup, thickening it with natural potato purée and leaving behind lovely little potato lumps.

It’s an old-school technique that offers wonderful results.

Step 3: Add Parm Rinds (Optional)

All of the steps described above are building towards a more full-flavored broth, but we can do more. One easy way to improve the soup’s quality is to use a quality chicken stock, whether homemade or store-bought. Another is to chuck a Parmesan rind or two into the pot.

This is an optional step, but it’s a worthwhile one if you can get your hands on a rind. That shouldn’t be too hard—many cheese stores and cheese counters sell them for cheap, a nice way for them to make a little extra money off something that is otherwise trash. You could also save your own leftover rinds, which is the most cost-effective approach of all.

And I should add: It doesn’t have to only be a rind from Parmigiano-Reggiano. You will get just as good results with a rind of Grana Padano, which is very similar in flavor to Parmesan, and often a little less expensive.

After simmering the rinds in the soup for a while, you can pluck them out and throw them away, pop them in your compost, or gnaw on them like a hungry raccoon.

The final steps: Finish the soup with cream, ladle it into bowls, and top it with grated Parm at the table. I’d like to think this is how a Tuscan would cook zuppa toscana, if that was a thing they did.

Cook Mode
(Keep screen awake)