Corfu Vegetable and Pasta Soup (Bourou Bourou)

Bourou bourou is Corfu's household soup, the one made from whatever the garden had too much of and whatever odds and ends of pasta were rattling round the cupboard. The name is onomatopoeic, the sound of everything going into the pot together, and that is more or less the method.

It sits somewhere between a soup and a very loose stew. The vegetables are cooked down in a serious quantity of olive oil first, which is what gives it body, and then the pasta goes in near the end and thickens everything further as its starch releases.

It is nistisimo by default, which is why it appears so often through Lent, and it is one of those dishes that costs almost nothing and still tastes like a proper meal. In Corfiot homes it is served with bread, sometimes with crumbled feta on top for anyone not fasting.

Key preparation steps

1. Soften onion, carrot and celery in plenty of olive oil.
2. Add courgette, potato and tomato and cook down.
3. Simmer in water until the vegetables are soft.
4. Add broken pasta and cook until thick.

Why does the olive oil go in at the start?

This is a ladera-minded soup. The vegetables are sweated in a genuinely generous amount of olive oil before any water arrives, which draws out their sugars and gives the finished soup a body it could never get from water alone.

Use a good oil and do not be shy with it. Roughly a hundred millilitres for five portions sounds like a lot until you taste the difference between a bourou bourou made that way and one made with a token spoonful.

What vegetables belong in bourou bourou?

Courgette is the constant, because the dish belongs to the part of summer when there is more courgette than anyone knows what to do with. Potato, carrot, onion, celery and ripe tomato make up the rest of the standard cast.

Beyond that it is genuinely open. Green beans, peppers, a handful of chard, the last of a marrow: all of it goes in. What the dish will not tolerate is anything with a strong flavour of its own, such as cabbage or fennel, which takes over the pot.

Which pasta should I use?

Traditionally whatever was left over, snapped into short lengths. Spaghetti broken into three-centimetre pieces is the most authentic thing you can do, and small shapes such as ditalini or broken hilopites are equally correct.

Add it in the last ten minutes and let it finish in the soup rather than cooking it separately. The starch it sheds is doing structural work here, and rinsing it away leaves the soup thin.

How thick should it be?

Thick enough that a spoon stood in it leans rather than falls, but still spoonable. It should never be a stew you eat with a fork, and it should never be a broth you could drink.

It thickens noticeably as it sits, because the pasta keeps drinking. Loosen it with a little hot water when reheating, and taste for salt again afterwards, since diluting flattens the seasoning.

What matters in this dish