Instant Pot White Bean Minestrone

This Instant Pot White Bean Minestrone is a hearty soup made from scratch. By using dried beans the soup is so much more flavourful, and the beans have a much better texture than canned beans. Sure, by using canned beans, you can make this soup probably in 20 minutes, but the flavours and texture don’t compare.

♥ What is white bean minestrone?

Minestrone is a bean soup with veggies and pasta or rice, sometimes both. In this soup, I used dried cannellini beans and veggies such as celery, tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, onions and bell peppers. To flavour the soup, I used traditional Italian herbs such as basil, bay leaf, rosemary, oregano and naturally garlic. The gluten-free pasta is added at the very end, so it holds its texture and does not become mushy. The broth in this white bean minestrone is so delicious! 

♥ Why is it better to use dried beans vs canned beans.

When you examine recipes that include canned beans, the first thing you need to do is rinse the beans. Do you know why that is? The thick liquid you find in canned beans is mostly starch and a lot of salt. If you are using canned beans in recipes and you don’t rinse the liquid, the taste of a dish will not be the same. The texture of canned beans is also mushier then when you use dried beans. Some canned beans also have a metallic flavour, so by rinsing the beans, you may remove some of that flavour – or not. When it comes to salt, most canned beans contain about 1000 mg of sodium per cup. After you rinse the beans, you are still left with about 700 milligrams. We should not consume more than 1,400 milligrams of sodium the entire day, so this is a lot of sodium our bodies don’t need.

In summary, when cooking beans from scratch, you control the salt, the beans taste better, they have a better texture, and you don’t taste the metallic flavour. So this is a no brainer, cook the beans from scratch. And this brings me to why I used the Instant Pot for this white bean minestrone -> the time. By cooking dried beans in an instant pot, you will cut the cooking time by more than half then cooking the soup on the stove.

To finish the soup the Italian way, I topped the soup with plenty of fresh Parmesan cheese. This white bean minestrone is most certainly a nourishing meal in a bowl. Add some delicious gluten-free garlic cheese monkey bread, and the dinner is complete. And remember, bean soups always taste better the next day. Enjoy!