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What to eat in Tuscany? Top 5 Tuscan Sausages and Salamis

Last update: Wed Feb 12 2025
Top 5 Tuscan Sausages and Salamis
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Best Tuscan Sausage/Salami Types

01
Salame Toscano
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Salame Toscano is a traditional salami hailing from Tuscany. It's produced with pork's ham, shoulder, lean belly, lard, and spices. The meat is ground and the lard is mixed with salt. The two are combined with spices, then stuffed into natural or synthetic casings.


The salami is dried and well seasoned for at least 4 months before it's sold or consumed. Salame Toscano has an intense flavor of spices and meat, and the cross-section reveals a nice distribution of lean meat and fat. It's recommended to serve it thinly sliced with cheese, wine, and bread.

02
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The origins of finocchiona can be traced all the way back to the Middle Ages, when fennel seeds, which were easily found in the fields all across Tuscany, were used as a substitute for the rare and expensive pepper. In fact, the name of this typical Tuscan salami comes from finocchio, the Italian word for fennel.


Finocchiona is made from finely ground pork neck and shoulder, ham trimmings, rump, lean belly, collar and flank. It's flavored and seasoned with salt, pepper, peppercorns, and garlic. The sausage is characterized mostly by the pronounced aroma of fennel seeds and sometimes even flowers, if used in the mince. 
03

Sausage/Salami

PROVINCE OF PRATO, Italy
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Mortadella di Prato is a traditional sausage made from pork and selected spices and flavorings. Made in Tuscany since the 16th century, mortadella was first introduced as a way to make use of pork cuts of lesser quality and meat scraps left over from the making of other salami products.


Later, in the early 20th century in the provinces of Prato and Pistoia, these less popular meat cuts were typically seasoned with spices and liqueurs, formed into sausages and boiled. This particular kind of sausage is still produced according to an old recipe: mortadella di Prato is a refined and cooked meat product, flavored with garlic, mace, pepper, coriander, cinnamon, and cloves, all stuffed into a natural casing. 
04
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Biroldo is an Italian dark brown blood sausage, spotted with lighter-colored chunks of meat and fat. The Tuscan biroldo is traditionally made with parts of pig offal that wouldn't be used for other sausages, such as heart, lungs, and tongue, but the version from Garfagnana is different from those prepared throughout the rest of the province because the pig's head is also used – to be more precise, it is the main ingredient.


Boiled offals are chopped, flavored with cloves, star anise, cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel, and garlic, combined with pig's blood and formed into a sausage, using the pig's bladder or stomach as a casing. Biroldo can be enjoyed fresh or preserved in lard. 
05

Sausage/Salami

TUSCANY, Italy
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Biroldo is a dark red Tuscan blood sausage, spotted with lighter-colored chunks of meat and fat. It is traditionally made with parts of pig offal that wouldn't be used for other sausages, such as heart, lungs, and tongue. Typical flavorings include cloves, star anise, cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel, and garlic.


This soft-textured sausage can be enjoyed fresh or preserved in lard. Although biroldo blood sausage represents one of the most ancient flavors of the region, nowadays it is not widely enjoyed.

VARIATIONS OF Biroldo

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Tuscan Sausages and Salamis