Fennel Soup

If you love the light and summery flavors of Mediterranean cooking, this white bean fennel soup recipe is for you. It brings together fennel’s delicate anise flavor with tomatoes and other regionally appropriate herbs, and adds cannellini beans to make it more filling.

The soup is nourishing and flavorful and attractive to the eye as well, all very good things. Don’t forget to save the fennel fronds, which you can chop and add to the finished soup as another garnish.

How to Chop Fennel for Soup

If you aren’t used to working with fennel, it’s helpful to have a quick primer on how to cut it up for use in this soup. Your best option is to slice away the celery-esque stalks (which are tough) and then to cut the bulb in half lengthwise. Trim away the hard core from the root end, and then slice the bulb thinly into half-rounds. Finally, cut those half-rounds into halves or thirds for use in the soup. If you’re a visual learner, take a look at our illustrated guide to cooking with fennel for inspiration.

Ingredients for Fennel Soup

Christine Ma for Taste of Home

• Onion: Onions are a mainstay ingredient in most soups, providing a savory base flavor with a hint of sweetness.
• Fennel: Fennel is both a vegetable and a herb, with a distinct anise flavor in the bulb and fronds. Here the bulb is used primarily as a vegetable, but it adds to the soup’s flavor as well.
• Chicken or vegetable broth: Prepared broths are a game-changer when you’re a soup lover but have time constraints. Instead of slow simmering for hours, you can start with a prepared broth and have soup on the table in well under an hour.
• Cannellini beans: Cannellini beans (also sometimes called white kidney beans) are nicely bite-sized, bigger than the small navy beans that are often used in soups. They have a low-key savory flavor and a pleasantly creamy texture.
• Diced tomatoes: Tomatoes and fennel are a classic Mediterranean combination, and in this case both the tomatoes and their juices become part of the soup.
• Thyme: Thyme’s distinctively herbal, peppery flavor complements both the fennel and the tomatoes in this soup.
• Bay leaf: Like thyme, bay brings a familiar and distinctive flavor to the soup’s broth. Just remember to remove it before serving.
• Spinach: Spinach brings a bold, vivid color and plenty of vitamins to the soup.

Directions

Step 1: Prepare and simmer the soup

Christine Ma for Taste of Home

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the onion and fennel, and saute them until they begin to soften. Add the broth, beans, tomatoes, thyme, pepper and bay leaf. Bring the saucepan to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover the pot, and cook the soup at a low simmer for about 30 minutes, or until the fennel is completely tender.

Step 2: Finish the soup

Christine Ma for Taste of Home

Remove the bay leaf and discard it. Add the spinach and cook for three to four minutes more, or until the spinach is wilted. Serve the soup immediately.

Christine Ma for Taste of Home

Variations on Fennel Soup

• Go with faux fennel: Fennel is reasonably easy to find in supermarkets, but it won’t necessarily be there the day you go looking for it. If you can’t come up with a fennel bulb, you can fake it with a combination of fennel seed or caraway, and thin-sliced celery. Celery has much the same appearance in your bowl and texture in your mouth, and the anise-flavored seeds simulate fennel’s flavor.
• Add sausage: The recipe as written makes a soup that’s vegetarian- or vegan-friendly, assuming you use vegetable broth. If that’s not your thing, Italian sausage is a flavor-appropriate addition that makes for a heartier soup. Start by slicing the sausage diagonally, then brown it in a skillet. Saute the fennel and onion in the sausages’ rendered-out fat, then blot up the excess drippings and proceed with the recipe as written. Add the sausage to the pot about halfway through the 30-minute cooking time.
• Give this Italian-style soup a French twist: Along the Mediterranean coastline of France, variations of “soupe a pistou” are a common lunch offering. They’re light and brothy soups, and the finishing touch is a large, toasted crouton spread with pistou (the local version of pesto). Spreading a toasted slice of baguette with pesto, and floating it on top of the soup when you serve it, makes the soup more filling and brightens it with the pesto’s fresh basil flavor.

How to Store Fennel Soup

If you have leftover fennel soup, transfer it from the saucepan to food-safe storage containers, or a covered bowl, for refrigeration. It will cool more quickly in separate containers, especially flat shallow ones, than in a single large bowl (spread them out on your fridge’s shelf, rather than stacking them).

Can I make white bean fennel soup ahead of time?

You can prepare the soup a day or two in advance, if you wish, right up to the point where the spinach would be added. Refrigerate it until mealtime, then bring it back up to temperature on the stovetop. Once it reaches serving temperature, add the spinach as directed in the recipe.

How long will fennel soup keep?

If you avoid perishable add-ins, the soup should last four or five days in your refrigerator. The sooner you whisk it away to the fridge once the meal is over, the longer it will keep. The spinach will become softer as the soup sits, but not to the point of becoming unpleasant.

Can I freeze white bean fennel soup?

This soup freezes and thaws reasonably well. The weak link is the spinach, so if you plan to freeze a portion of the batch, you’d ideally separate it before the spinach is added. It’s still fine to eat even if it’s frozen and reheated with the spinach in place, but the spinach tends to soften. Serving fresh bread with the soup, to provide a textural contrast, can help conceal that minor shortcoming.

Fennel Soup Tips

Christine Ma for Taste of Home

Can I use fresh tomatoes instead of canned?

You can definitely use fresh tomatoes, if your garden is overflowing with them or you got a great deal at the farmers market (peeling the tomatoes is optional but recommended). Unless the tomatoes are ripe and flavorful they won’t be an upgrade, because canned tomatoes go straight from the field to the cannery when they’re at their best. Also, canned tomatoes have calcium added so they won’t fall apart in cooking. Fresh tomatoes will break down when the soup is reheated, or frozen and thawed.

Can I substitute different beans?

Cannellini look good in fennel soup recipes, including this one, and they’re nicely spoon-sized, but you can use other beans if you wish. Smaller white beans are the best choice, because they preserve the soup’s visual appeal, but any beans you personally like are perfectly fine.

What other herbs can I use in this soup?

Fennel’s delicate anise flavor is the soul of this soup, but that doesn’t mean you can’t complement it with other ingredients. If you have plenty of herbs at your fingertips, try adding a small quantity of fresh dill, tarragon, chives, parsley, chervil or even mint to the soup. Choose just one (too many will muddy the flavors), and use it with a light hand so it doesn’t overwhelm the fennel.