artisanal thinking

Once, for the Italians of Piedmont, though perhaps hard to fathom, the cost of cacao—due to World War II rations, exceeded that of a provincial achene—the Hazel! So their story goes, confronted with limited supply and unmet demand, Mr. Pietro Ferrero sought to decrease the price of and make chocolate available to the common fascista by grinding not just one seed, but two! With the inclusion of relatively cheap hazelnuts and vegetable oil, the proto-Nutella was born. Also a man of his time in using cartoon characters to market sugar to children, Pietro called his creation Pasta Gianduja, the paste of Gianduja, a role in Commedia dell’arte representing the town of Turin, where Ferrero’s pastry shop was located, prior to the war.

Because it still involved cocoa butter, which as we all know, forms the crystals responsible for chocolate’s snap, the Gianduja was not a spread like peanut butter or the Nutella we know today, conversely, because it involved a high percentage of non-cocoa-butter fat, it was not so brittle and unsliceable like pure dark chocolate. Rather, it was in between the two extremes, and though it holds together in a block, Gianduja can be easily cut to any shape desired, without snapping or making little shards like when chocolate is broken. Therefore, Gianduja was sold in loaves, the idea being to cut a slice and make some kind of dessert sandwich from it.

Apparently, bread not being a component of the Piedmont youth’s ideal form of dessert, they would toss the bread and just eat the hazelnut-chocolate—of course, such an unbalanced breakfast leading straight to mother’s dismay. To address this situation, three years after the launch of Pasta Gianduja, Pietro introduced, in 1949, Supercrema Gianduja, which, now being spreadable, could be smeared on bread, and goddammit if the kids could isolate the Gianduja after such a treatment! In fact this cheap, democratic treat even lead to a (erotic?) service known as ‘The Smearing’, where after school, children could bring slices of bread to a shop with obvious consequences. Finally, after the death of Pietro and his brother, Ferrero’s son, Michele, took control of the company and to serve Gianduja’s global conquest, he altered the name to Nutella—a graceful word emphasizing the original innovation of bottom-line bolstering nuts.

The Recipe and its Malcontents

I’m not exactly sure what the composition of Gianduja was in the 40s or 50s and perhaps neither is anyone else outside of the Ferrero family—like Coke, with its ’secret formula,’ including ingredients like ‘burger betterer’ and ‘tongue tapper’, the recipe for Nutella is claimed to be a guarded secret. These absurd claims have been aggravating even economists recently. But perhaps that we accept such disingenuous and opaque providences in our food, is explained by a youth-cultural movement known as ‘The New Sincerity’ in which the ability to understand one’s character is seen as a flaw and neither irony, nor honesty are inscrutable enough to base one’s philosophy on. Instead, we mix veracity and deception into a milieu (or a pasta?), that we declare, by the force of our conviction, represents reality.

Of course, we can always return to the grounding foundation of the ingredients label, and in the case of coke, perhaps the above mentioned secret ingredients do hide under the auspices of ‘natural flavors’…but satisfactorily enough for me, Nutella has no such dodges, and find that its recipe is roughly, sugar, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil (or more recently, modified palm oil), hazelnuts, cocoa powder, skim milk powder, soy lecithin and artificial vanilla flavor. In addition, the percentages of the last three major (though the first advertised !) ingredients are made public. There are slight differences depending on country of origin, but the standard Nutella contains 13% hazelnuts, 7.5% cocoa powder and 5% skim milk powder. We also know the percentage of fat and sugar coming from each of the ingredients, which together with from the total amount of each constrains the problem enough for us to reverse engineer, just from the nutrition facts, that Nutella contains 50% sugar and 22% oil (soy lecithin & vanillin are negligible).

Throughout the course of my chocolate making adventure, the prospect of making a Nutella which features hazelnuts and cacao more prominently than accessories to fat & sugar has been turning in the back of my mind. I am not alone in the desire for a grown-up Gianduja: search google for ‘homemade Nutella’ and you will find countless bloggers with Cuisinarts in hand in pursuit of the same end. Most notably, Ms. Amy Scattergood brought the matter to the public attention with her write-up in the LA Times. As I, Ms. Scattergood is not attempting to emulate the ’secret’ recipe—’Making homemade Nutella isn’t really about reproducing something,’ rather the goal is, ‘homemade stuff [which] is glorious, neither as sweet as Nutella nor with that vague aftertaste that comes, perhaps, from the oils or emulsifiers.’ Her glory is tempered only in the fact that, for her, ‘the texture is grainier, as it would be without the use of an industrial machine.’

Unique Equipment and Experiment Uno

But let’s not be coarse, Amy! The cause of grit is not difference in scale, but in applying inappropriate equipment to the task. For, chopping is not grinding, and while the whirly blade of a food processor leaves large particles intact, the shearing force of granite in the Santha grinder will bring us to micron scale. I therefore feel not only the personal desire to experiment with homemade hazel-chocolate, but the civic responsibility to offer my grinding services where grinding is required.

So after a long struggle to find whole milk powder, I was finally able to make my first batch of Nutella about a month ago. The main reason for reverse engineering the recipe was to satisfy my curiosity and to figure out the amount of oil required to achieve a similar consistency—then I promptly forgot the recipe and devised one of my own. I wanted to seriously increase the flavor, so I settled on 35% sugar, 35% cacao beans, 20% hazelnut, 10% milk powder, finally one more cacao bean to tip the scales in chocolate’s favor. With 50% fat in cacao beans and 60% in hazelnuts, I had enough to compensated for the fat lost from tossing the oil.

The next thing to consider is texture. As we all know, chocolate gets it’s snap from the crystals that form in the cocoa butter, but non-cocoa butter fat will inhibit these crystal from forming as tight a structure, and if the percentage gets too high, the chocolate will temper differently, cease its snap and though still solid, it will kind of crumble. Usually this is undesirable, say in a milk chocolate, but since I am trying to emulate the texture, at least, of Nutella, I wanted something which had a lot of non-cocoa butter fats to hopefully contribute to spreadability, but still some cocoa butter so that it is not just oily, but in the balance between structure and malleability. I’ve heard that above 10% non-cocoa butter fat is the tipping point for such a transition, and with 20% hazelnuts and whole milk powder I would achieve that.

I undershot my mark, however, and what I ended up with was not in any way spreadable like Nutella but really more like the original formulation Pasta Gianduja! This makes sense, because many milk chocolates go for as low a cacao content as 33%, so what I made should be more accurately described as Milk Chocolate with Hazelnut… Another issue was that I didn’t think I would need to temper this stuff, so I poured it directly from the grinder into jars. I was disproved, however, as within a day, bloom, cocoa butter exfoliating to the surface, appeared–thankfully, only a cosmetic defect. A final problem with the first batch, being the first time I used milk powder, I didn’t really conche hot enough or long enough. At first, the Gianduja had a distinct powdery taste, which brought up memories of childhood in cash-strapped houses of a few friends…not entirely pleasant. Stangely enough, this flavor mellowed after about a week, and at the very least I’ve been content to cut slices of Gianduja from my jar and eat them in sandwiches and with bananas for the last month.

La Deuxieme: Necessity of Powder & Unexpected Oil

Looking back on the ingredients list of Nutella, I figured that if I wanted the Supercrema rather than the Gianduja, I would probably have to work mostly with cocoa powder rather than beans. Lacking (at least for now!!) a hydraulic press, I had to purchase some commercial cocoa powder. The first place I look was, of course (!), the food coop, but to my surprise they only had Equal Exchange dutched cocoa powder! We can talk about that later, but it suffices to say that dutch-process cocoa is made from lower quality cacao that has been processed with alkali to obtain a uniform sweet flavor. Not for me!—the artisan’s cocoa powder should be labeled ‘natural’. Anyways, not too far away, I found some Rapunzel cocoa powder that fit the bill.

For the second trial, losing most of the cacao beans, I needed more fat to keep the mixture smooth and free-flowing in the grinder. Therefore, I gave the hazelnuts more room and settled on a proposed recipe of, 35% hazelnut, 35% sugar, 10% milk powder, 10% cocoa powder and 10% cocoa beans. I wouldn’t dare to dispense with the beans altogether, and I thought with only 5% cocoa butter in the melange, they would not form many crystals, and may help to get my desired texture. Well, last Friday I started grinding this batch, and things were going smoothly, that is until I was halfway through adding the milk and cocoa powder. I had already put in all the beans and nuts, to get as much fat in there as I hoped I would need to emulsify the various powders, but things (including the plot of this story?) started to thicken! I hadn’t even started adding the sugar, but the wheels were having a hard time working through my Nutella mass.

In all the recipes I had found online they did add extra oil, so I didn’t panic, but reached into my pantry and pulled some canola (he LA times folks used hazelnut, but I was making do) to grease my wheels. I added a couple ounces at a time, as necessary, until I finished adding my powders and powderized sugar and with 7 ounces total of addition oil, I once again had a smooth substance. I’ve also now worked out a system where I place the grinder inside my oven, to trap more of its heat until I warm the bowl to 165F. At this temperature, sugars in the milk powder should simplify, funky powdery odors should evaporate, creamy sweetness should be all that remains.

After grinding overnight, I tasted some encouragingly hazelnutty, chocolatey spread and put it in jars to chill. Success! No bloom, no extreme-solidification, just complex, creamy, spreadable hazelnut-chocolate. Comments have included, ‘Way better than the first batch!’ and ‘MMMMMM!’. More encouragingly, my sample jars are quickly emptying, but help me kill them—I am currently offering to smear any slices of bread that cross my path!

Economic Comparison

One question that homemade Nutella attempts to answer is, ‘is it worth it?’ One 13oz jar of Nutella costs about $5 (or about $6/lb), but is half sugar! Based on retail prices for Nutella quality ingredients, I calculated that each jar contains $.25 in sugar, $.10 in oil, $.70 in hazelnuts, $.50 in cocoa powder and $.25 in milk powder giving a total cost of $1.80. Note that the son we heard of earlier, Michele Ferrero, is the richest man in Italy, with over $10 billion in assets, even more than playboy prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi! For my batch of 69 oz, I ended up using 21 oz sugar, 21 oz hazelnuts (plus one hazelnut!), 7oz cocoa powder, 7oz cocoa beans, 6oz milk powder and 7oz canola oil, which worked out to a total cost of about $25, leading to about $5 in ingredients for my 13oz jar.

I was going to finally give a nutritional comparison, but if you’re eating it at all, you don’t eat chocolate-hazelnut spread for the health value…. Well, whether there is a market for high-quality Nutella, whether it could be slightly more wholesome…these are issues for another day, all that I care about now is slathering a crust of bread with gooey-brown and enjoying food at its finest.