Dec 6, 2018 | Ari's Favorites

Cal-Fiorentina Steak at the Roadhouse

Dry aged steak dressed with exceptional new harvest olive oil from Enzo Olive Company!

by Ari Weinzweig

If you’re up for a really nice steak, if you love great, green, really peppery olive oil, if you want to celebrate Hanukkah in super fine style, or you just want a good meal, the Cal-Fiorentina steak at the Roadhouse could just be your ticket!

To give some context and explain the name, La Fiorentina is the classic steak dish of Florence. Generally, a big T-bone, cooked rare, finished with great Tuscan olive oil. In the never-ending entertainment I get out of playing with words, I combined the La Fiorentina, with the California origins of the oil, and got…Cal-Fiorentina!

The main thing, of course, is that this dish is delicious! It’s definitely on its way to becoming a great December tradition at the Roadhouse—the Hanukkah miracle is actually tied to the arrival of new harvest olive oil (think about it—waiting for more “holy oil” for the Temple? What was given to the priests in every culture was always the first fruits of a harvest. What time of year is olive oil harvested in the northern hemisphere? Add them together and the answer is that the Maccabees were waiting to bring the new harvest olive oil to the Temple to relight the Eternal Light with new harvest oil)!

If you aren’t familiar with new harvest oil—Olio Nuovo in Italian—it’s exceptionally green, delicious and excellent. More polyphenols, more peppery. Olive oil, of course, unlike wine, is at its peak of intensity immediately after being pressed. Even in the bottle—while still super delicious six or sixteen months later—will slowly but surely soften in flavor as the weeks pass. So getting this new harvest olive oil only a week or two after it’s been pressed is a special eating experience that can’t be replicated later in the year. The new harvest olive oil we are using for this very special Hanukkah dish is from Enzo Olive Company, and it has a complex flavor profile along with a rich, complex history.

The story of Enzo Olive Company

The story of the Enzo Olive Company begins back in 1914, when Vincenzo Ricchiuti made the voyage from Puglia in Italy—home to the bread we know here at Zingerman’s as Paesano—to the U.S., ending up in the Central Valley of California. The year in which Ricchiuti arrived in North America was at the end of four decades of mass immigration from Italy. Between 1880 and 1914, more than four million Italians came to the U.S. The window closed when WWI began in 1914. The vast majority of those immigrants were young men looking for work. Most came to the States intending to later return home to Italy, but less than a third of them ever did. Like most rural Italians of that era, Vincenzo was very adept at growing vegetables in his garden. (For a beautiful understanding of Italian immigrants, gardening, and people trying to make their way in a new place, see Angelo Pellegrini’s The Unprejudiced Palate. Pellegrini came to the U.S. from Tuscany in 1913, a year before Ricchiuti.) As many of us have done, Ricchiuti figured out how to turn his passion into his profession. His grandson, Vincent Ricchiuti, writes, “Initially, my great-grandfather planted vegetables, but knew diversification was key for long-term sustainability. With this in mind, he planted the first family acreage with grapes and figs.” 

In 1956, the same year as the Hungarian Revolution, Vincenzo’s son Pat turned the family farm into a formal business. The P-R Farms brand quickly became widely known for premium quality peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, citrus, grapes, almonds, and olives. Four generations later, true to the olive oil-producing region of Puglia from which Vincenzo Ricchiuti had grown up, the family began the olive oil business in 2008. In honor of Vincenzo, they used his nickname, Enzo, on the label. Following the family’s century-old commitment to excellence, Enzo Olive Oil has never stopped its pursuit of making high-quality products. 

The climate in the Central Valley is very close to that of the Mediterranean. What we have on hand now is made from the Koroneiki olives they’re growing. To use a football metaphor, the Enzo oil runs beautifully right up the middle of the flavor-field. Significant but not strong; fruity, gentle, complex, and full-flavored all at the same wonderful time. It’s so good that it made Food & Wine’s “Five Favorite New California Olive Oils” list. The Enzo oil is awesome on anything you like olive oil on—bruschetta, pasta, vegetables, fish— and in this case, steak!

About our steak.

And, of course, I don’t want to pass over the main point of the dish which is the actual steak! As it has been for so many years now, the steers for the Roadhouse beef are raised entirely in the pasture. The sides of beef are dry-aged for about five weeks, before being butchered in the Roadhouse kitchen. The steaks are cooked to order over oak wood logs, then finished with the olive oil. A great meal, and a marvelous and historically appropriate way to celebrate Hanukkah!