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The Tuscan desserts you'll meet most often in Florence are cantuccini with vin santo, Siena's panforte, seasonal schiacciata and gelato. They range from panforte, dense with honey and candied fruit, to castagnaccio, which has no sugar in it at all. Many follow the time of year, so what turns up after your meal depends on when you visit.
Cantuccini and Vin Santo
Tiramisù may be the most famous Italian dessert, and Florence has its own chilled, dome-shaped answer in zuccotto. But the dessert you'll see on most Florentine menus is cantuccini with vin santo. Almond biscuits (cookies) are quite hard and dry on their own. Dip them into a glass of sweet wine and they become a delicious, addictive reviver at the end of a meal.
Bakers shape cantuccini into a long flat loaf, bake it, take it out of the oven and slice it. Then the pieces go back in for a second bake. That is what makes them biscotti, literally "twice cooked."
Since 2016 Cantuccini Toscani have been a protected IGP, made with whole almonds, skins on. On a trattoria menu you'll usually see the pairing written simply as cantucci e vin santo.
Vin santo translates as "holy wine". The name may come from its use in mass from the Renaissance on, or simply from its heavenly taste. It is a sort of Tuscan style dessert wine, usually made from white Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes. Winemakers dry the harvested grapes on straw mats, or hang them from the rafters, to draw out the sweetness of the fruit. Then they ferment them slowly in small wooden barrels called caratelli. Many families still make this amber-coloured wine at home and serve it after a meal as a digestif.
Florentines tell a third story about the name. At the Council of Florence in 1439, a Greek churchman supposedly called it "xanthos", golden. The Florentines heard santo. The bottles in the shops take their time too. Producers can't sell Vin Santo del Chianti DOC before 1 November of the third year after the harvest.
Schiacciata fiorentina
Look for seasonal desserts like schiacciata fiorentina. It's a sort of sponge cake, dusted with icing sugar and cocoa in the form of the Florentine lily, and you'll find it around Carnival time in the winter. Schiacciata con l'uva appears instead in the late summer and early autumn. This autumn version is a sweetened flat bread with ripe red grapes. It's best a day or so after baking, when the sweet juice from the grapes has soaked in to the dough.
The Carnival one is soft and smells of orange zest. Some recipes add a pinch of saffron, which gives the crumb its yellow colour. The old recipe uses lard, which is why Pellegrino Artusi listed it as schiacciata unta, "greasy schiacciata". Some pastry shops slice it in half and fill it with cream. In the weeks before Lent you'll find it in bakery windows and bars, sold by the square.
For the grape version, Florentine bakers use small black wine grapes, Canaiolo or Sangiovese, seeds and all. Expect a little crunch. Some bakers scatter fennel seeds on top as well. It sits on bakery counters from September until the end of October, then disappears for a year. There's even a competition among the city's bakeries for the best one. Many Tuscan desserts follow the calendar like this, which is half the fun of looking for them.
Panforte
Panforte is a very rich, dense, calorie bomb of a fruit cake. Bakers make it with candied fruit and nuts, honey, vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon. A speciality of Siena, it goes back to medieval times, when people kept fruit in honey for the winter. Spices came in during the middle ages, and a lighter, sugar-dusted version followed in the nineteenth century. Pellegrino Artusi already included it in his 1891 cookbook. Today you can find panforte in shops all over Siena and Florence. It is usually a round cake only about half an inch tall. A tiny wedge and a small glass of vin santo will give you plenty of energy for the rest of the day.
That lighter version has an exact birthday. In 1879 Queen Margherita came to Siena for the August Palio. The city's bakers made her a panforte with fewer spices and a coat of icing sugar. They called it panforte Margherita, and today most people call it panforte bianco. The darker panforte nero, with more spice, is closer to the old recipe.
Both carry the Panforte di Siena IGP label. Bakers traditionally made it from September to Christmas, but Siena's shops now sell it all year. Next to it on the shelf you'll usually find ricciarelli, soft diamond-shaped almond biscuits covered in icing sugar.
Castagnaccio: Tuscan Desserts at Their Plainest
In autumn, when the new chestnut flour comes in, bakeries and a few trattorias make castagnaccio. It is a flat, dense cake of chestnut flour, water and olive oil. Pine nuts, rosemary and sometimes raisins go on top, and there's no sugar added at all. It's an acquired taste and not every visitor acquires it, but it is very Tuscan.
Gelato
Italian ice cream, gelato, is world renowned for its flavour and quality. Good gelato uses fresh whole milk, sugar and often eggs, plus real fruit, chocolate, nuts or coffee. For the best quality, look for a gelateria that offers gelato artigianale (artisan ice cream) or produzione propria (home made). First choose the size of your cone (cono) or cup (coppa), then the flavours to go in it. You can always choose more than one. Don't forget the wonderful fresh fruit sorbets (sorbetto), or a semi-freddo, a cross between a mousse and an ice cream. Semi-freddo often contains uncooked eggs, so it doesn't suit everyone.
Florence likes to claim gelato for itself. Florentines credit Bernardo Buontalenti, the Medici architect, with serving a frozen cream at court in the sixteenth century. Plenty of gelaterie in town still sell a flavour called crema Buontalenti. It's a plain milk-and-cream flavour with nothing to hide behind. That makes it a good first scoop to judge a gelateria by.
Avoid shops with huge mounds of artificially-coloured, industrial ice cream that ignore the Italian principles of fresh, natural produce. A good way to tell is the banana gelato. It should be a dull, light greyish-yellow, not bright yellow. The pistacchio should be a dull, light sage green rather than bright green.
And tiramisù?
Most accounts place the birth of tiramisù in northern Italy, not Tuscany. Still, it is the dessert our farmhouse cooking class ends with. If you add the market tour, the day starts with a guide at the Mercato Centrale, Florence's central food market. You taste and shop for ingredients there. Then a short drive takes you to a kitchen on a country estate outside the city. There you make fresh pasta by hand and put the tiramisù together yourselves. Then you all sit down to eat it with a glass of Chianti. You also go home with the recipes. We wrote more about the sweet side of our classes in our piece on the Tuscan desserts cooking class.
