Vegan Tuscany and Tuscan Soups

Vegan Tuscany and Tuscan soups: how to taste a people!

Vegan Tuscany,  you can really learn to love it, but above all you will understand it, tasting its typical dishes, starting from the most simple, best known old traditional tuscan food: and among them the first place belongs, to the “ribollita”, the most famous Tuscan soup, whose traditional preparation is naturally vegan … since always!

The ingredients of this naturally Vegan recipe are simple: stale bread, black cabbage and beans (borlotti and cannellini types), plus a few other cabbage types, maybe found in the garden of the house, and culinary herbs such as garlic, red onion, celery and carrots, that will make all together the base of the taste.

FOOD AND CHARACTERS

If we look at all these ingredients we discover with amazement a true synthesis of Tuscany and the personality of its inhabitants, starting with black cabbage which is the undisputed star of this dish. It is tasty, the most flavorful of all varieties of brassicas, its leaves are humped and its coastline is very hard: just as is the typical Tuscan character: Tasty in humorous joke always ready and leathery in character with whom it is not always easy to get along.

BLACK CABBAGE, BEANS AND STALE BREAD

And what about the succulent beans? Rich in nutrients and soft (after cooking), as the rolling Tuscan hills: soft and covered of vineyards and olive groves and where you can find the best extra virgin olive oil and the famous Chianti wine. Nowadays it is easier to find vegan wine also in the Chianti area.

And what about stale bread? Valuable practice that makes us understand how the rural culture still influences the habits of an entire region, even in the city. In fact, a good Tuscan never throw away the typical saltless and slicing stale bread! And it becomes the third star of this soup that you can eat especially in the winter, when the cabbage, after hearing the first cold, becomes tastier and more nutritious! But you can also enjoy it in the summer, cold, as the peasants did when they brought it in the olive groves and ate it at lunch during the olive harvest.

BROTH OR DRY? THIS IS THE PROBLEM!

But what ultimately expresses the typical Tuscan character, of both people and the territory, in the cabbage soup is the broth. Scattered throughout the region there are various versions of the soup: the base have the same ingredients, but there is one who prepares the most liquid, with more broth, or more dry.

And now the grand finale, as it should be for an evergreen dish although it has thousands of years: a handful of fennel seeds and a little of golden olive oil, and this rustic soup, peasant, born by the harshness of the land suddenly becomes the most refined dish, valuable in its taste which includes dozens of shades as the best of the paintings of the great Tuscan artists such as Michelangelo and Raffaello Sanzio, because art, like the good life, in Tuscany is within everything, and just waiting for you to discover it in its most unthinkable corners.