Tuscan beef is impressive, but we are still learning how to pick the right cuts

Luigi Bianchi hangs prociutto in his butcher shop.

Ordering meat in Tuscany is an art form that we have far from mastered. In fact, we’re rank amateurs of the lowest levels. We know the difference between suino (pig), vitello (calf) vitellone (bull), tachino (turkey) and pollo (chicken), but that’s about it. The problem comes when Lucy uses one of her cookbooks, and it tells her to use beef round steak, or chuck steak, or sirloin, or brisket or tenderloin. What is the corresponding cut in Italian? We have no idea.

It’s true that we can find equivalents on the Internet, but we rarely think of this before we go to our usual supermarket, Esselunga. This morning we took a walk to San Salvatore, and passing our favorite macelleria, owned by Luigi Bianchi, we decided to order some meat from him for making beef stroganoff. We knew it would be more expensive than the supermarket, but Luigi is practically legendary for serving the finest meats. Luigi is also extremely personable, and his kindness sometimes draws us to stop by even when we have nothing in particular to purchase.

We met Luigi on one of our first stops in San Salvatore, back in 2011 when Steve and Patti Gray were helping us make our initial move into the Casolare dei Fiori. Luigi’s shop is often busy, but he’s never in a hurry, giving each customer his full attention. We noted that the locals would sometimes ask him for advice about how to cook and serve certain cuts, and he always had ready answers that would sometimes turn into longer discussions about various other food-related topics.

Luigi occasionally sings when serving his customers, but even when he doesn’t sing, his voice has a melodious quality, and he sometimes repeats words for emphasis and just because he likes the sound. “Tre fette, sottili, sottili,” he might say in a voice that is not quite singing, but almost. Three slices, thin, thin.

So, having no idea of what to ask for, we told Luigi that we wanted a good cut for cutting up and frying in a pan without water. We had caught him at a time when his equally likable son Matteo was also in the shop, as was a middle-aged lady waiting behind us. What followed was a minute-long discussion between Luigi, Matteo and the other customer about the names for different cuts of beef and where they were located. We watched as Luigi sliced off three steaks amounting to 670 grams (about 1.5 pounds) of what he explained is called groppa in the Tuscan dialect.

The cost was 13 euros, which I thought expensive but paid for without hesitation. Certainly, we could have found something less expensive at Esselunga, but we wouldn’t have known if it was the right meat, and we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of interacting with Luigi and Matteo.

Back home, I looked on the Internet for a translation of groppa. Google translate said “croup,” which was no help at all. Then I looked at diagrams of meat cuts and still didn’t find it on any of the examples. Doing a word search combining groppa and vitellone, I found an article that explained that each region in Italy uses completely different words to describe cuts of meat, kind of like regional dialects on steroids (the dialects, not the meat). I also found that Italians and Americans have different shaped diagrams for beef cuts.

Italian bovine

It seemed that we had received what most commonly is called scamone, “a high grade of beef with little fat that is ideal for grilling.” But the description of scamone was followed by this explanation: “Il termine scamone è forse il più conosciuto ed è utilizzato a Milano e Verona. A Bologna viene definito fetta, a Firenze melino, mela o groppa per i genovesi è punta e cassa del belin, mentre per i napoletani è la colarda. A Palermo viene chiamato sotto caduta mentre a Torino è il sottofiletto spesso.” Basically, this says that every region has a different name for the same cut of steak (and Florence has three different names for it). Luigi used one of the Florentine names.

American cow

The meat selection problem is further complicated by the fact that the cow diagrams I found online have different versions in Italy than in America. The scamone, or groppo, seems to be close to what the American diagram calls sirloin, or maybe even tenderloin, but it also seems to overlap a little with the round. However, I doubt that Luigi would have given us round steak, which is not good for grilling, so I presume that we have either sirloin or tenderloin, and thus the price is not at all out of line. Statista.com says the average price of sirloin in the USA was $8.31 a pound in 2018, so our 1.5 pounds would have cost about $12.45. We’ve found overall meat quality in Italy to be superior to USA meat, and Luigi’s meat to be superior to that found at the supermarket. So that’s some fine beef stroganoff we’re going to be enjoying this week!

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 Postcript: The stroganoff was superb, not only because of the quality of the beef but also because we used fresh Italian pappardelle and locally sourced mushrooms and onions. There's nothing quite like eating a Russian delicacy with Italian ingredients.