I’m a few weeks behind on blogging, so I’m going to combine my two trips to Tuscany (first to Siena and San Gimignano, second to Florence and Pisa) into one post.
Italian American food is full of lively flavors- strong tones of garlic intermingling with the crispy sweetness of fresh tomatoes. However, if you are expecting this type of vibrant cuisine when you visit Florence and Siena, you might as well board a train to Southern Italy as fast as you can. Tuscan food can be properly characterized with one word- hearty. As Bill Buford said in his book Heat, while the plates in other Italian regions overflow with color, Tuscan plates tend to be full of various shades of brown. Tuscan specialties? Steak, bean and bread soup, and wild boar ragu. Noticing a chromatic theme? In Tuscany, Brown is Beautiful.
San Gimignano, our first destination represents pretty much everything I could want in a tourist destination. The streets are lined with small wine, cheese, and meat shops that are willing to let tourists sample Tuscan specialties free of charge. Since it’s a perfectly preserved medieval walled town, the town itself is a beautiful setting for this type of food exploration. Many of the wines we sampled, including strong chianti reds and a light, white San Gimignano specialty called Vernaccia, were made with grapes from vineyards that we drove past on our way into town. We also sampled some cheeses, including pecorino made with cheese from the milk of locally grown sheep. If all of Italy cares about food freshness, then Tuscans can be considered freshness fanatics.
As we continued our amble, a boar’s head posted on the entryway of a small butcher shop beckoned us like mindless pigeons chasing a stray crumb. Inside, we found a plethora of cured meats, including boar prosciutto and boar sausage with truffle. The prosciutto was fun for the novelty, but its pork-based cousin tastes much better. However, the truffle salami correctly balanced the sometimes-overwhelming flavor of truffles with the saltiness of the wild boar. Usually, in these posts, I focus on the food and make small mentions of my other activities as an aside. In San Gimignano, food was the one and only activity. Go there. Seriously.
After more wine tasting, we forged through some heavy rain (while making terrible jokes about Under the Tuscan Sun) to our selected restaurant. The signed posted on Trattoria Chiribiri boasted in English that they were open “no-stop,” and poor English usually translates to authentic Italian food, so I had a good feeling about this place. Kristen and I decided to order the Florentine steak, which is legendary for its tenderness and extra-beefy flavor. A few minutes after our waiter removed our menus, a slab of raw meat was presented to our table from Kristen and I to approve. After our nods of approval (were we really going to say no?), the woman brought the slab of beef back to kitchen, where (I can only assume) it was cooked briefly. When she brought it back to the table, the steak had a nice brown color outside, but the color of the middle closely resembled the raw hunk we had seen minutes ago. Harboring some American neuroticism, I was tentative about this t-bone: I’ve eaten rare meat before, but this was, as Italians call it, al sangue (with blood). After tasting the meat, I quickly forgot all the propaganda I’ve ever seen about mad cow disease. By the end of dinner, I was gnawing on the bone fiendishly to salvage any tasty specks.
This individual entrée represents a larger cultural difference between Italian and American food preservation. In America, we have an obsession with refrigeration- meat has to be vacuum packed, spiked with preservatives, and constantly kept at a steady temperature. In Italy, meat makes its way onto a plate much more quickly in most cases thanks to the slow food movement and the Italian culinary tradition. Therefore, meat that has spent some time outside of a refrigerator or that has only been slightly cooked does not make Italians squirm.
Subsequent visits to Florence and Siena did not yield the same type of culinary bliss as my day in San Gimignano, but they were both great destinations for other reasons. Some of the highlights include Il Campo, a giant shell-shaped piazza in Siena, and the Synagogue of Florence, a magnificent structure that rivals many of the churches I’ve seen. In Florence, I also got to satiate one of my biggest food cravings- I finally got a burrito. Unsurprisingly, Mexican food options are scant in Italy, so I’ve been exhorting my sister to mail me a burrito to no avail. My burrito in Florence from Eby’s Latin Bar did not closely resemble a Chipotle creation, but it will certainly tide me over until I return to the US.
Another thing I can’t fail to mention: the gelato in Tuscany. The fact that I haven’t discussed Italian ice cream yet is actually hilarious, considering I eat it many times a week (I try to avoid consecutive days, but I’m not perfect). People say that gelato in its current form originated in Florence, so I had to sample what Tuscany had to offer in the way of frozen treats. In San Gimignano, we went to Pluripremiata Gelateria , which was a finalist in the World Gelato Championships (yes, its real). The cinnamon flavor there absolutely blew my mind (Elena wanted to go back for a cone with 3 scoops of only cinammon). In Florence, my host Setz recommended a place called La Carraia, which was way better than any gelato I’ve tried up North. In particular, the yogurt and nutella flavor was streaked with giant clumps of real nutella. I’m starting a dream team gelato cone- so far it consists of Kanella (cinnamon) from Pluripremiata and Yogurt e Nutella from La Carraia.
The lesson learned from this trip? Florence and Siena, the big cities of Tuscany, are great places to absorb the abundant art and architecture of Tuscany. If you want to sample the many browns of Tuscan cuisine, you would be better served to leave the city and check out smaller towns like San Gimignano.
