Pizza Soup Recipe – How to Make it in 7 Simple Steps

Is there a picky kid in your life who only eats pizza, nuggets, and waffles? If you are trying toe expand that child's palate, you may want to try this recipe for Pizza Soup. With familiar flavors of Italian herbs, tomatoes, meat, and cheese, it's certain to be a hit.

If you ask any group of kids what they would like for dinner, there is a pretty good chance that the majority of them will respond with “pizza.” Combining the tangy, sweet flavors of tomatoes, the savory taste of Italian-style herbs, and the appeal of meat and a few kinds of veggies, pizza is a familiar and delicious meal for many people.

Pizza Soup Recipe

April Freeman

This recipe for Pizza Soup takes those familiar taste sensations, and it combines them together in a soup that every member of the family will love. 

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Prep Time 15 mins

Cook Time 40 mins

Total Time 55 mins

Cuisine Italian

Servings 6 Servings

Equipment

• Large Dutch Oven
• Spatula
• Serrated Knife
• Baking Sheet
• Ladle
• Bowls

Ingredients

  

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• 1 teaspoon Minced Garlic
• ½ cup Finely Chopped Bell Pepper of Any Color optional
• ¼ cup Minced Onion optional
• 2 tbsp Chopped Olives optional
• 2 tbsp Olive Oil
• 28 ounces Canned Crushed Tomatoes
• 2 cups Water
• 14 ounces Canned Tomato Sauce
• 6 ounces Canned tomato Paste
• 3 tbsp Italian Seasoning
• 1½ teaspoon Dried Basil
• ½ cup Pepperoni cut in half
• 15 pcs Frozen Meatballs precooked 
• Mozzarella Cheese to serve
• Slices of Italian Bread to serve

Instructions

 

• In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and bell pepper to the hot oil and sauté the veggies until they are soft. Add the garlic and cook everything together until the garlic is golden brown.
  
• Add the crushed tomatoes, the olives, the water, the tomato sauce, the Italian seasoning, and the dried basil.
  
• Stir in the pepperoni and the meatballs.
• Bring the soup to a boil, and then reduce the heat to low, simmering it all together, and stirring it occasionally. Simmer the soup for about half an hour or until the frozen meatballs are completely heated through. 
• Cut the Italian bread into 1-inch slices with a serrated knife. Put the bread slices on a baking sheet and bake them at 400 degrees until they are toasted for about 10 to 15 minutes. Take the bread out of the oven and then turn the oven on to broil.
• Put the soup into ovenproof bowls with a ladle and top each one with one slice of bread. Sprinkle the top of each bread slice with mozzarella and put each bowl back onto the baking sheet. 
• Put the baking pan with the bowls on top of it back into the oven and bake them for 3 to 5 minutes, watching them carefully. Remove the bowls from the oven when the cheese is bubbly and lightly browned. Be careful when serving, since the bowls will be very hot.
  

Notes

If you have ever had to handle picky kids, mealtimes can turn into a time of stress, anxiety, and frustration. Parents become annoyed that something as basic as eating can cause conflict, and the kids just want to eat the food items that they already love and are familiar with. One thing that doctors and food experts recommend to help picky kids expand their palates is something called food chaining.

Food chaining takes food that a kid already loves and slowly alters it so that eventually, the child is willing to try something new. For instance, a kid who loves applesauce might be encouraged to eat baked apples, apple pie, and then eventually, a whole, raw apple with the peel on. 

Things like our recipe for Pizza Soup are great for helping kids learn to try new things. The flavors of a favorite food, pizza, are present, but they are just there in a different form. The pizza seasonings are identical, the pizza toppings are present, but they’re just in a soup instead of piled on top of flatbread.

Another way to encourage kids to try something new is to allow them to help prepare their meals. This is especially a good thing for picky kids because they can rest assured that some tricky adult did not try to sneak an unappealing vegetable into the recipe. The kid can know that the preparation of the food includes exactly all the ingredients that they already like and nothing else.

You may want to alter this recipe to suit your tastes or those of your kids. If you do not care for black olives, onions, or bell peppers, you can leave these ingredients out without a problem. You can also add other toppings that you might enjoy.

If you want to toss in a bit of browned ground beef, bacon, or ham, your pizza soup will reflect the kind of pizza that you enjoy. 

Our recipe for Pizza Soup is served with a slice of toasted Italian bread right on top. We sprinkle the bread with mozzarella cheese and put it all under the broiler to give this recipe a unique twist and to mirror the texture of a real slice of pizza.

However, if you think that your kids will turn up their noses at this way of serving the soup, you can definitely skip this step. Just sprinkle the tops of the soup bowls with a pinch of mozzarella and let it melt a bit before serving.

Keyword Pizza Soup, Recipe, Soup

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