Top Tuscan soups to beat the chill

Cacciucco, perhaps comes from the Turkish world “kuciuck”, which means minute, small, and indicates precisely a dish in which ingredients are made into small pieces. Cacciucco is a popular seafood soup from the coast of Livorno and Viareggio, but each town has its own recipe.

Cacciucco di ceci is vegetable soup made with dried chickpeas and chard and seasoned with extra virgin olive oil. A simple dish that you can find in the hills around Florence.

Farro, or spelt, was one of the favorite dishes of the Romans who used it to feed their legions. It isn’t widely eaten today except in the Garfagnana area where it is still made into fantastic soups. 

It’s a very ancient dish, which used to be prepared on the ships – hence the name: bordatino is zuppa di bordo (on boat soup). It’s made with corn flour, beans and seasonal vegetables. Francesca (aka The Black Fig) shows us how to prepare a great bordatino.

Carcerato is a traditional soup from Pistoia. It’s made with giblets, stale bread and water and enriched with spices, cheese and garlic. Check out this article about the origins of the soup and follow the video-recipe.

Maybe the most famous Tuscan soup, ribollita is made with stale unsalted Tuscan bread and a variety of vegetables including the local Tuscan kale.

Acquacotta means cooked water, and its secret probably lies in the simplicity of the recipe and its natural, local ingredients: celery, basil, tomatoes, eggs…. the ingredients change according to the seasons, so there’s no such thing as a standard recipe for this dish.

This dish comes from the uplands and uses yellow or maize flour. This farinata can only be prepared in winter, when fresh black cabbage (cavolo nero) grows. 

Since it has a very sweet flavor for Tuscan tastes, in Tuscany you’ll always find it combined with strong flavored ingredients such as onion or herbs as rosemary. Let’s travel to the heart of the Valdarno for a hearty pumpkin soup recipe.