Gianduja
You got hazelnuts in my chocolate! You got chocolate in my hazelnuts! Hmmm… Two great tastes that taste great together.
If you know nothing about this historical confection, then you clearly haven’t read my post on gianduja ice cream. Go check it out. I’ll wait.
Back already? Great.
You can buy gianduja from specialty stores online. But you’ll typically only find large quantities, and maybe you don’t want 5 pounds of it. Maybe you just need a little to make some slammin’ ice cream. It’s only chocolate and sugar and hazelnuts, after all. Can’t you just make it yourself right in the comfort of your own chef’s kitchen? You sure can.
And in the interest of scientific exploration and completeness, I shall.
There are two methods described by Greweling in Chocolates and Confections. One involving commercially available praline paste and the other involving simple hazelnuts and sugar.
Method one: Praline paste plus chocolate
Commercial praline paste.
Praline paste is typically 50% roasted hazelnuts and 50% sugar. It’s roasty and toasty and caramel-ly. Add two parts praline paste to one part melted chocolate, and you have 1:1:1 gianduja.
I found a place that sold Callebaut praline paste in 8 ounce portions. So all I needed to do was melt 4 ounces of the chocolate of my choice (I used bittersweet) and combine them. Very, very easy.
Except then I attempted to temper that mixture. Not so easy. How about I talk about that later? For now let’s pretend that I didn’t have to do that and move on.
I piped it into little bars using a silicone mold and let it set at room temperature.
Yay! Little bars of gianduja!
Piping into silicone molds. Handy hint: place the mold on a cookie sheet, and then tap it on the counter to level the candy and work out the air.
Method two: Hazelnuts plus sugar plus chocolate
Start with oven toasted hazelnuts - rub off the skins (or buy them already skinned!) and throw in a food processor with 25% the final weight of confectioner’s sugar until the nuts release their oil and become a smooth liquid the consistency of heavy cream. Add melted chocolate and confectioner’s sugar so that the final mix is 1:1:1 hazelnuts:sugar:chocolate by weight.
I used 4 ounces toasted hazelnuts, 4 ounces confectioner’s sugar, and 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate. I ground the hazelnuts with one ounce of sugar. The remaining 3 ounces were added at the end along with the melted chocolate.
As you grind the nuts, they will go through various stages. You will need to stop several times along the way to scrape the bottom of the mixing bowl. That way, you ensure that everything is going along for the ride.
Once you release all the oils in the hazelnuts and achieve the final liquidy texture, add the melted chocolate and the rest of the sugar and pulse to combine.
Then you can pipe it into those little silicone molds, or into one big block, or directly into your mouth. Don’t pretend like you’ve never done that. We all know better.
What was that bullshit about tempering? And WTF is tempering anyway?
If you don’t what to get deep in the weeds, you can skip this part. If you’re into a little off-road adventure, follow me.
When chocolate solidifies, its fats crystallize. Those crystals can take several forms - six to be exact - and only two of them are stable. If you have unstable crystals in your solid chocolate, the chocolate looks dull, doesn’t have the same “snap”, and is subject to bloom, which is sort of like psoriasis for chocolate.
Tempering is the process that encourages the right crystals to seed themselves. It usually involves cooling the chocolate while agitating it so that the larger crystals don’t have a chance to form.
Gianduja for confections typically goes through a tempering process. Not necessary if you are only going to use it for ice cream or, say, shoveling directly into your face. Which is what I hope you are going to do with it, because tempering it is a lot more difficult than tempering plain chocolate.
Why? Because gianduja is a mix of both cocoa butter and hazelnut fats. Which is a eutectic mixture. Meaning that it crystalizes and melts at a lower temperature. Meaning close to room temperature. Meaning pain in the ass.
I did my best to temper both my batches. I did all the sliding and scooping over a marble slab - which isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds. And I probably helped it set, but in the end it wasn’t about to win any beauty contests.
What does this all mean for you? Hopefully nothing. Like I said, for ice cream (or face shoveling) slap that shit together and Bob’s your uncle!
But if you want to make gorgeous artisan confections: 1. Start with tempered chocolate and don’t overheat it during the melting process 2. Crack an actual book on the subject, because I am not the expert you need. Bitch, please.
The Comparison:
Once my mixtures were finished and pseudo tempered and hardened into little bricks, I compared them side by side.
On the left, gianduja made with commercial praline paste. On the right, the homemade version.
The gianduja made from commercial praline paste was very smooth, sweet, and caramelly. The one I made with home-roasted hazelnuts was a little less sweet and had a very fresh roasted-nut aroma and taste. It had just the teensiest grittiness in the texture, which wasn’t at all unpleasant. Both were great, but I actually preferred the taste of the homemade version, as did my taster-dude.
The Bottom Line:
You don’t need to buy praline paste. If you have it anyway, great. Use it. But otherwise, get some high-quality blanched hazelnuts and roast them at home and use the food processor method. You can control everything - make it a little less sweet, change up the chocolate - milk, dark, bittersweet, and even change the type of nuts you use. Almonds, pistachios, just about all the nuts you can name.
It will be delicious.
And please, please, please…let me know how it turns out. I get lonely all by myself here in Blog Land.