My father made pici every Sunday. He didn't use a recipe. He stood at the counter with flour on his arms to the elbows and he rolled pasta until the pile was high enough to feed everyone who showed up, and people always showed up. He died in 2019 and I took over the trattoria, and I still make pici the way he taught me. This is it. The authentic Tuscan pasta recipe from Florence that we actually cook, not the one someone reformatted for an SEO blog.
What is pici, and why should you care?
Pici is the oldest pasta in Tuscany and the most forgiving. It's a thick, hand-rolled pasta made from flour, water, and salt — no eggs, no machine, no nonsense. You take the dough, you roll it into long fat ropes with your palms, and that's the shape. There is no other shape. It comes from the Sienese hills but it belongs to all of Tuscany, and every family rolls it a little different. Mine rolls it thick, the way my grandmother did, because thin pici is just bad spaghetti.
The key thing about pici is the texture. Because it's all flour and water, it has a density and chew that egg pasta doesn't. It holds onto sauce by grip, not by delicacy. This is why it goes with ragù bianco and not, say, a light cream sauce. You need a sauce with enough body to stand up to it.
Ragù bianco: the Tuscan sauce with no tomato
Ragù bianco is the sauce that confuses people the most when they first come to the trattoria. They read the menu and they ask: no tomato? That's right. No tomato. The "bianco" is not a modifier — it's the whole point.
This is a slow-cooked meat sauce made from a soffritto (onion, carrot, celery), ground or finely chopped pork and veal, dry white wine, a small amount of herbs, and time. The fat renders out of the meat and back into the sauce. The wine reduces. The vegetables dissolve. What you end up with is something much more concentrated and savory than a tomato-based ragù, with a pale, glossy appearance and a depth that takes two hours to build.
Pellegrino Artusi — who is essentially the Escoffier of Italian cooking, and who codified much of Tuscan and Emilian cuisine in the late 19th century — documented white meat sauces with pasta throughout his work. The technique is older than the tomato in Italian cooking, which only arrived in meaningful quantities after the 18th century. When people say "traditional Italian pasta sauce," they often mean tomato. They are wrong. White ragù came first.
The dough: flour ratios and why they matter
For four people you need:
- 300g '00' flour (finely milled wheat flour, low protein)
- 100g semolina rimacinata (finely ground durum wheat semolina)
- Approximately 200ml warm water
- 1 teaspoon fine salt
Mix the flours together first. Make a mound on the counter, make a well in the center, add the salt to the water so it dissolves, then pour the water into the well a little at a time while mixing with a fork from the inside out. When it comes together, knead with your hands for 10 minutes. You want a smooth, elastic dough that doesn't stick and doesn't crack. If it cracks, add water a teaspoon at a time. If it sticks, add flour a pinch at a time.
Wrap it tightly and let it rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature. This is not optional. The gluten needs to relax or the dough will spring back when you try to roll it and you will lose your mind.
The '00' and semolina combination is the correct ratio for pici. The '00' gives you the silky, workable quality; the semolina gives the pasta grip so the sauce sticks and the texture holds after boiling.
Shaping pici by hand: the only right way
Pull off a piece of dough about the size of a walnut. On a lightly floured surface, use both palms to roll it into a rope about 30cm long and roughly 5mm thick — thicker than spaghetti, thinner than your thumb. Slightly uneven is correct. If it's perfectly uniform, you're overthinking it.
Lay the finished pici on a tray dusted with semolina so they don't stick to each other. Don't pile them. Don't cover them with a wet towel — they'll go gummy. Leave them out, dusted, until you cook them.
This process takes time. Put on music. Open the wine now. The whole point of making pici is the making.
Ragù bianco: the recipe
You need:
- 200g ground pork (not too lean — 15-20% fat minimum)
- 200g ground veal (or chicken thigh if you can't find veal)
- 1 medium white onion, finely diced
- 1 medium carrot, finely diced
- 2 stalks celery, finely diced
- 1 clove garlic, crushed and left whole (you will remove it)
- 150ml dry white wine (Vernaccia di San Gimignano if you can get it; any dry Italian white otherwise)
- 2 sprigs fresh thyme
- 1 small sprig fresh rosemary
- 3 tablespoons good olive oil
- Salt and black pepper
- Optional: 50ml whole milk, added at the end
Start the soffritto: heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium-low heat. Add the onion, carrot, and celery with a pinch of salt. Cook slowly — 15 minutes minimum — until they're completely soft and beginning to turn golden. Add the garlic, cook for one more minute, then remove the garlic and throw it away. It's done its job.
Turn the heat to high. Add the meat in two batches, breaking it up with a wooden spoon, and sear until browned on all sides. You need real color here. If the pan fills with liquid and the meat steams gray, your pan isn't hot enough. Drain the batch, wipe the pan, reheat, and try again. The browning is the flavor.
Once all the meat is browned and back in the pan, add the wine. It will steam and hiss. Good. Stir up all the browned bits from the bottom. Add the thyme and rosemary. Turn the heat to low, put a lid on it slightly askew, and cook for 90 minutes. Check every 20 minutes. If it looks dry, add a small splash of water or white wine. At the end of 90 minutes, the sauce should be thick, fragrant, and barely wet. Remove the herb sprigs. Taste for salt. If you want it a little rounder, add the 50ml of milk now and let it absorb for five minutes.
No cream. Do not add cream.
Cooking the pasta and bringing it together
Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Salt it until it tastes like the sea — this is how my father said it, and he was right. Pici takes longer than you think: 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. Taste one after 8 minutes. It should be cooked through with a slight resistance in the very center, not chalky.
Reserve a ladle of pasta water before you drain.
Add the drained pici directly to the ragù pan over medium heat. Toss everything together, adding splashes of the pasta water to loosen the sauce and make it coat every strand. Thirty seconds of tossing over heat is what transforms "pasta with sauce on top" into actual pasta. This matters.
Serve immediately. No parmesan. In Florence we don't put parmesan on pork ragù — we use pecorino stagionato, grated finely, in a small amount, only if you want it. My father never used it. I use it sometimes. Don't use the green canister.
What NOT to do
No garlic in the final sauce — one clove, removed early, is tradition. Not four cloves sautéed. Not garlic powder, which I will not discuss further.
No canned tomato. Not even a spoonful "for color." You've made something else at that point.
No olive oil from a spray can. No pre-ground dried herbs. No rushing the soffritto. No cooking the pici in advance and reheating — fresh pasta waits for no one.
And for the love of Sant'Ambrogio, do not serve this with garlic bread. Serve it with Florentine pane sciocco — the unsalted bread of this city, which has existed since the 1300s and which exists precisely to mop a plate like this without fighting the salt in the sauce. Salted bread next to ragù bianco is a category error. I say this as someone who loves bread.
Wine pairing: Chianti Classico, not a question
Chianti Classico DOCG. The Sangiovese grape grown in the hills between Florence and Siena. It has tannins to cut the fat of the pork, acidity to brighten the whole plate, and an earthiness that rhymes with the herbs in the ragù. A Fontodi, a Castello di Ama, a Barone Ricasoli — any serious Chianti Classico will do it. Pour it now. Pour it before you start cooking. That's the other part of the recipe.
This is the pasta my family has made since before I was born. You won't make it exactly the way we do the first time. Make it anyway. Make it again. By the third time, your hands will know how thick to roll the pici, and you'll stop measuring the wine.
If you want to cook this together, or argue about bread, or just tell me how the ragù turned out — I'm here.
