Must-try foods in Florence Italy and where to find them
21.07.2023 - 07:49
/ roughguides.com
Rough Guides editor – and self-confessed ‘accomplished eater’ – Annie Warren heads to Italy to find out what makes food in Florence so irresistible.
Italian cooking is home cooking. It’s not like other national cuisines, where value is placed on the exact preparation of premium ingredients by highly-trained chefs. Italian cooking prides itself on its domesticity. Dishes are to be fed to friends and family and prepared with fresh ingredients from the local market. Recipes are passed down through generations.
Perhaps it is partly this emphasis on ‘home’ that explains why Italian cuisine has such geographic specificity… After all, home is geographically specific, particularly for Italian cultural identity.
As author Beth Brombert writes: “Someone from Castellina in Chianti is Italian if, say, he goes to Paris. In Italy he is Tuscan; in Tuscany he is Chiantigiano; and in Chianti he is Castellinese.”
Likewise, while regional food does exist, most dishes are better known for being from a specific town.
The perfect illustration of this point is bread.
Your writer's Pane Toscano, Italy © Annie Warren
While I am an accomplished eater, I am an extraordinarily average cook. Understandably then, turning up to a bread-making class on my first day in Florence made me more than a little nervous.
On arriving at School of Culinary Arts Cordon Blue Florence, the other students explained to me that this was day six of a 15-day course. During the course they would learn how to make over thirty varieties of Italian bread in total.
This, I was told, hardly scratched the surface of all the types of bread there are in Italy! The teacher took one look at me standing nervously in the pristine monogrammed apron the school had lent me and assigned me the easiest bread on the day’s curriculum: pane toscano.
Pane toscano means Tuscan bread. It is better known within Tuscany as pane sciocco or ‘bland bread’ because it is the only bread in the world traditionally made without salt. It has been made this way for centuries.
There are several theories for the reasons behind this unusual method. One harks back to when Pisa and Florence were at war during the Middle Ages. Legend has it that Pisa, being closer to the sea, controlled the production of salt and refused to supply it to Florence in the hope of hastening their surrender.
Another theory is that salt was just too expensive. A third is that bread was made without salt to compensate for the fact that Florentine prosciutto is already extremely salty, much more so than varieties from other regions.
When made correctly, pane toscano is a rustic-looking, oval loaf. It has a crunchy crust and springy white insides with plenty of bubbles. The more salt there is in a dough, the fewer bubbles there