Roman Broccoli Soup with Tubetti and Pecorino Romano

If you think your winter garden is less fertile than its summer counterpart, perhaps you're short on ideas for how to cook winter vegetables.

The colors in the garden this season are certainly greener and lack the reds and yellows that the sun provides, but the variety of vegetables opens up new recipes. Among other things, you can still see some orange from the last pumpkins before the frost changes the landscape.

Today, we're focusing on Roman broccoli, the type that resembles cauliflower and is beloved by mathematicians for the perfect shape of its rosettes (called pinecones in Rome), which recall the Fibonacci sequence and fractal geometry: each individual pine cone is a smaller copy of the larger plant.

Like most vegetables, Roman broccoli can be eaten raw with dips, but I prefer to cook it and enjoy it in a nice hot soup.

Roman Broccoli Soup with Tubetti and Pecorino Romano Recipe

For this typical Roman dish, start by preparing a vegetable broth with an onion, celery, and a carrot.

Then clean the broccoli, removing the green florets and the smaller outer leaves.

In a pan, make a base with garlic, oil, chili pepper, and a couple of anchovy fillets in oil. Add the vegetables and let them cook. Shortly after, add a little tomato paste, stir, and thin with the vegetable broth.

Let the broccoli simmer, and when the tubes are almost cooked, add the broccoli and finish cooking the pasta.

Finally, off the heat, add some grated pecorino, mix everything together, and serve. At the table, garnish the plate with a light sprinkling of pecorino.

In the glass, I chose a structured and full-bodied white wine.