Why It Works
- A combination of Italian sausage, fresh fennel, and fennel seeds gives the soup a subtle sweetness and fragrant aroma.
- Cooking the tortellini separately from the soup prevents the pasta from overcooking and dissolving in the soup.
- Topping the soup with pesto and Parmigiano-Reggiano gives each bite a herbaceous, nutty flavor and welcome richness.
There are two members of our team who are constantly lurking on Reddit: our editorial director Daniel and me. When I’m not giggling at the silliness of forums dedicated to eggs in strange places or slices of bread stapled to trees, I’m perusing the cooking subreddits, where I get inspiration for recipes and, from time to time, anonymously answer culinary questions. Recently, my feed’s been filled with posts dedicated to what Redditors are calling “the soup,” “updoot soup,” or “upvote soup,” a creamy slow-cooker soup with chicken, spinach, and tortellini.
Apparently the soup has been making the rounds on Reddit since at least 2017, and while some users love the meal enough to include it in their regular rotation, others describe it as an “aggressively mid” recipe that requires many tweaks in order to taste good. (There’s even a thread in which people share their favorite variations on the original recipe.) Curious to see what the hype was all about, I decided to give the original recipe, or what is supposedly the original recipe, a try.
Serious Eat / Amanda Suarez
The recipe instructs cooks to microwave onions, flour, basil, garlic, and tomato paste with a drizzle of olive oil before tossing it into a slow cooker with chicken broth, diced tomatoes, and boneless, skinless chicken thighs. The soup cooks for a whopping four to six hours on low heat before you finish it with tortellini, spinach, Parmesan, and heavy cream. While it was incredibly easy to make, it just wasn’t flavorful enough for my liking. But I felt it had a lot of potential. So, like my fellow Redditors, I decided to put my own spin on the soup. Here’s what I did to take this soup from, yes, “aggressively mid,” to actually delicious.
How to Make Truly Good Creamy Tortellini Soup
Ditch the microwave and slow cooker. I understand the appeal of a set-it-and-forget-it meal, but this is a quick, easy dinner that really doesn’t require (or benefit from) either appliance, and you’re much better off taking the time to brown your aromatics.
Swap out the chicken for sausage. Instead of chucking in several boneless, skinless chicken thighs, I started the soup by sautéeing juicy Italian sausage, which has a sweet, floral note from fennel seeds, in a large pot. Then I further built flavor by using the leftover fat from the sausage to cook my aromatic soffritto (more on that below) right in the same pan.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Sauté a soffritto. Italian soffritto has the same building blocks as mirepoix—a mixture of onion, carrots, and celery frequently used as a flavorful base for dishes in French cuisine—though it may also contain fennel, parsley, and/or garlic. For a soup with layers of flavor, my soffritto includes a combination of onion, garlic, celery, carrot, and fennel, plus fennel seeds and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. As mentioned above, I cooked this mixture in the sausage fat, scraping up the fond to form the most flavorful base possible for the soup.
For a nice dose of umami, use tomato paste instead of diced tomatoes. Though fresh and canned tomatoes contain plenty of glutamic acid (a chemical that gives food an umami note), reaching for them in their concentrated form—tomato paste—is an easy, minimal-effort way to give the soup an intense savory flavor with hints of tangy sweetness.
Thicken with flour. To help thicken the soup and give it extra body, I coat the vegetables with flour, then cook the mixture for several minutes. Not only does this help remove the flour’s raw flavor, but it also prevents unpleasant and unsightly lumps from forming in the soup.
Skip the spinach and use a hardy green. Spinach is delicious, but it doesn’t have quite enough heft to stand up in this creamy, robust soup. So instead of spinach, I recommend using a hardy green like curly or lacinato kale, Swiss chard, or collard greens, which won’t get lost among the tortellini and pieces of sausage.
Serious Eat / Amanda Suarez
Cook the pasta on its own. As tempting as it is to make this a truly one pot meal by cooking the pasta in the soup, it’s worth taking the time to cook the tortellini separately. This allows you to control the doneness of the pasta and prevents the tortellini from overcooking and dissolving into the soup, creating an unappetizing mushy mess.
Serve it with dollops of pesto and plenty of Parmigiano-Reggiano. Instead of incorporating basil into the soup, which many versions call for, I top the soup with pesto for a touch of sweet, herbaceous flavor. A generous shower of nutty Parmigiano-Reggiano brings it all together, and makes each bite wonderfully savory.
Serious Eat / Amanda Suarez
