Chianina Beef

Chianina is an Italian cattle breed and the tallest in the world. Adult bulls reach 1.80 metres at the withers and pass 1,700 kg; cows sit around 900. The coat is porcelain white over black skin, and calves are born a reddish fawn that fades within a few months.

It was not bred for beef. For roughly two thousand years the Chianina was a draught animal, pulling ploughs and carts through the Chiana valley, selected for height, leg length and heat tolerance, never for marbling or carcass yield. The switch to beef production happened between the 1950s and 1970s, when tractors made oxen redundant and the breed came close to disappearing.

Certified Chianina beef today is sold under Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale IGP, a mark covering three white breeds: Chianina, Marchigiana and Romagnola. Maremmana, the other Tuscan steak breed, is grey and sits outside that IGP.

The meat is lean. Fine grain, thin white cover fat, very little intramuscular marbling. Anyone raised on American beef reads it as dry on first encounter. Anyone who knows it will tell you that is exactly the point.

Beef flavour without the butter. The dominant note is mineral and faintly sweet, with an iron edge that gets stronger the rarer you eat it, and a long clean finish because there is almost no fat coating the palate.

On a properly grilled fiorentina the two muscles taste different enough to be worth separating. The strip side is firmer, denser, more savoury, with a charred crust that carries most of the flavour. The fillet side is soft, mild and almost delicate: it is the part people fight over and the less interesting half.

What you will not find is the buttery mouthfeel of a well-marbled ribeye. No fat melts through the muscle, so texture comes from the grain and from ageing: under-aged Chianina is simply tough, while three to five weeks of dry ageing turns it tender and adds a nutty, almost cured depth. Cook it past medium-rare and it goes fibrous, with no fat left to rescue it.

One rule matters more than the rest: take it out of the fridge two hours before cooking. A cold, thick, lean steak dries out on the surface long before the centre warms up.

Build a wood or charcoal fire and let it burn down to embers, because flames scorch and embers cook. Oak or holm oak in Tuscany, any hardwood elsewhere. Put the steak on a very hot grate, five to seven minutes a side, and do not move it or press it. Then stand it upright on its bone for another five to seven minutes so the heat reaches the middle.

Salt afterwards, never before, with black pepper and a thread of olive oil if you want it. Rest five minutes on a warm plate, cut the strip and the fillet away from the bone, slice both across the grain, and put the bone on the table: it gets picked up and gnawed, and that is normal. Rare is a requirement here, not a preference.

The rest of the animal is where the value sits. Peposo, shin with whole black peppercorns and red wine and six hours in a low oven, is the classic Tuscan use of the cheap cuts, and Chianina mince makes a ragù with far more character than commodity beef.

Raw, a fiorentina holds two or three days in the coldest part of the fridge, set on a rack inside a plate so it is not sitting in its own liquid, covered but not sealed. Cling film pressed against the surface keeps that liquid on the meat. With air around it the surface darkens as the pigment oxidises and a slightly tacky skin forms, which is exactly what a dry-ageing cabinet does on purpose. Vacuum packed by the butcher it holds ten to fifteen days and keeps ageing slowly; the sharp note on opening the bag clears within ten minutes in the air, and anything that persists is a question for whoever packed it.

It freezes badly. Ice crystals rupture the fibres and meat this lean comes out drier than it went in, so braising cuts are the ones worth putting in the freezer. Cooked leftovers are not reheated in Tuscany: the steak goes cold into the fridge and gets sliced thin the next day with oil, salt and rocket.

Certified meat carries the Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale IGP mark and a label giving the animal's identification code, the farm and the abattoir. That code can be checked, and it is the only test that settles anything. On the cut itself the colour is a bright red leaning towards pink rather than dark, the covering fat is white and thin, never yellow and never generous, and the grain is fine with very little marbling. A heavily marbled loin is not Chianina, whatever the sign says, so anyone shopping by American standards should expect the opposite of Prime.

A fiorentina is a cut, not a breed: the loin on the T-bone, fillet on one side and sirloin on the other, cut at least three or four centimetres thick and weighing one to one and a half kilos. An English-speaking butcher calls that a porterhouse; a thin 700 gram steak is a rib steak. In the United States, cattle sold as Chianina are usually domestic Chiangus crossbreeds, and restaurant menus using the word alone at a low price are rarely selling the IGP.

Genuine Italian Chianina rarely leaves Italy. EU beef exports to the United States run through a narrow hormone-free quota, so what American shops label Chianina is almost always US-raised Chianina-Angus crossbred cattle: a real product, but not Vitellone Bianco IGP. Expect around 15 to 25 dollars a pound for that, and 30 to 50 dollars a pound on the rare occasions an importer lands an actual Italian bone-in loin.

In the UK, a handful of specialist Italian importers and high-end butchers carry Italian bone-in loin, typically 40 to 70 pounds per kilo, sold by the whole steak.

In Italy, a certified fiorentina runs 32 to 45 euros per kilo at a butcher, up to 55 at a famous one, and 55 to 85 in a restaurant; braising cuts are 12 to 18 euros per kilo.

Wherever you buy, ask for the IGP label and the animal's identification code. The word 'chianina' on its own is not protected; the Vitellone Bianco dell'Appennino Centrale mark is.

Go to the Chiana valley rather than to Florence. Cortona has held its Sagra della Bistecca every mid-August since 1963, grilling over a fire pit tens of metres long in the Parterre gardens. Castiglion Fiorentino, Foiano della Chiana, Sinalunga and Bettolle all have butchers working animals from their own valley, and many have a grill room attached.

In Chianti, the butcher's shop at Panzano run by Dario Cecchini is the most famous stop and the most touristed; it is still worth an hour to watch a loin broken down properly.

Florence delivers, in the old trattorie of Oltrarno and around Sant'Ambrogio market, provided you ask where the beef comes from and accept the bill that follows. Anywhere advertising a cheap chianina fiorentina near the Duomo is not selling one.

Umbria is Chianina country too, and cheaper: Città della Pieve, Castiglione del Lago and the villages around Lake Trasimeno work the same breed for noticeably less money.