Tuscany Food & Traditional Cuisine

Almost everything Tuscany is known for eating comes from making a little go far. Bread is the base of three of the region’s best-known dishes, and in each of them it is stale on purpose. Olive oil does the work that butter does further north, and sauce is mostly absent — a Florentine steak arrives with nothing on it at all. What looks like restraint is really confidence that the ingredient is worth tasting.

Tuscan dishes tend to explain themselves once you know what they were for: using up bread, stretching a pot of beans, cooking meat over the fire you already had. Very few of them were invented to impress anyone.

Bistecca alla fiorentina

A porterhouse cut several fingers thick, from Chianina cattle, grilled over wood and served rare. No sauce, no marinade — salt, pepper and sometimes oil after cooking. It is sold by weight and normally shared, and asking for it well done is asking for a different dish.

Ribollita

Literally “reboiled”. Yesterday’s bean and vegetable soup thickened with stale bread and cooked again, which is what gives it the texture of something between a soup and a stew. Cavolo nero, the dark Tuscan kale, is the ingredient that makes it taste of here.

Pappa al pomodoro and panzanella

The other two bread dishes, and they split the year between them. Pappa al pomodoro is thick and warm, bread cooked down with tomato, garlic and basil. Panzanella is its summer opposite: bread soaked, squeezed and tossed cold with tomato, onion and oil.

Pici

Thick hand-rolled pasta from the south of the region, around Siena and Montepulciano, made with flour and water and no egg. Usually served all’aglione, with a sauce of tomato and a great deal of a large, mild local garlic.

Lampredotto

Florence’s street food: the fourth stomach of the cow, simmered long, sliced into a bread roll with salsa verde. Sold from carts rather than restaurants, eaten standing up, and still mostly bought by people on their way to work.

Cacciucco

The coast’s contribution, from Livorno — a fish stew red with tomato and chilli, poured over garlic-rubbed bread. Tradition asks for five kinds of fish, one for each C in the name, and it was built from what did not sell at market.

Tuscany separates its food shopping from its food tourism more clearly than most Italian regions, and the difference is visible in which market you walk into.

Florence’s two markets

The Mercato Centrale at San Lorenzo has a nineteenth-century iron hall with butchers and fishmongers below and a food court above. Sant’Ambrogio, east of the centre, is the one Florentines actually shop in: smaller, cheaper, with produce stalls outside and a handful of cooks inside serving lunch to people from the market itself.

The lampredotto carts

Tripe stands have been a fixture of Florence for centuries and remain genuinely ordinary — there are carts near Sant’Ambrogio, at the Mercato Centrale and in the Porta Romana direction. Queues are longest at mid-morning, which is when their customers take a break.

The oil harvest

Olives come in from late October through November, and the frantoi, the mills, run day and night for a few weeks. New oil is cloudy, green and peppery enough to catch the throat, and it is drunk on bread rather than cooked with. Many estates open the mill to visitors while it is working.

Sagre

Village food festivals, mostly between spring and autumn, each built around a single thing — a mushroom, a bean, a chestnut flour, a wild boar. They are run by local committees in a square or a park, priced for the people who live there, and are the least staged eating in the region.

Tuscany bottles four of Italy’s most recognised red wines and one of its most argued-about categories, and almost all of it is the same grape grown on different hills.

Sangiovese, first

Chianti Classico, Brunello and Vino Nobile are all Sangiovese. What separates them is altitude, soil and how long the wine is made to wait, not the vine. Knowing that makes a tasting across the region legible rather than a list of names.

Chianti Classico

The hills between Florence and Siena, and a smaller zone than the name suggests — Chianti and Chianti Classico are different appellations, and only the latter carries the black rooster on its neck. Greve, Panzano, Radda, Gaiole and Castellina are its villages, and most are ten minutes apart by car and an hour apart by the roads that connect them.

Brunello di Montalcino

Further south, warmer and drier, on a hill that stays clear when the valleys fog. Brunello must age five years before release, six for riserva, which is why the town has more cellars than its size explains. Rosso di Montalcino is the same fruit released early and is what most people actually drink there.

Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

East of Montalcino, and confusingly named: this is Sangiovese from the town of Montepulciano, not the Montepulciano grape grown in Abruzzo. The cellars run underneath the town itself, cut into the tufa beneath the main street.

The coast, and Vin Santo

Bolgheri, on the Maremma coast, is where Cabernet and Merlot were planted in the 1940s outside the rules of the day — the wines that followed were sold as table wine and became the most expensive in the region. Vin Santo is the other end of the scale: grapes dried on mats through winter, pressed late, and drunk with hard almond biscuits.