I was trying to figure out what to title this post, because I don’t feel like “Chocolate Hazelnut Spread” accurately describes what I ended up with. Have you ever looked at a recipe and thought “Wow, this is going to be so easy! And it will only take like twenty minutes! And will be amazingly delicious!” I may have jinxed myself with my over optimistic attitude. I have never made nutella before. I was expecting a creamy, chocolate frosting like spread. Instead, what resulted was kind of a disaster. I found hazelnuts at Trader Joe’s, sadly with the skins on. I tried the baking soda boiling water bath method to loosen the skins, as recommended by a fellow baker, but unfortunately for me I still had a lot of trouble. I wound up sitting over a bowl of nuts rubbing each one to individually get the skin off…after about half an hour the futility of my efforts seemed ridiculous, so I gave up and moved on to toasting the nuts as is.
I placed the result in a food processor, expecting everything to turn into a delicious looking nut butter. Unfortunately, after a few minutes it did not look like it was going well. I decided to move on to adding the rest of the ingredients, at which point my food processor started to protest. We have a house guest staying with us this week, and we had an amusing conversation standing over my food processor full sandy looking nut dust. “Maybe you should add more oil?” “Or some milk, maybe?” I ended up doing both, resulting in sandy looking nut paste. All of the would be ok if it actually tasted like Nutella, unfortunately it just tasted kind of bland. Not very chocolatey and oddly quite a bit more like almonds than hazelnut. Maybe I should have toasted the nuts longer?

I actually looked at a different hazelnut spread recipe from Giada De Laurentiis, which sounded like it would work a lot better. It had the line “Grind the nuts in a food processor until pasty (the nuts will be stuck to the sides of work bowl)” , which sounded exactly like what happened to me. And then you add chocolate chips, condensed milk and honey, which also sounded like it would have produced a creamier and more delicious result.
At the end of all this my husband wondered into the room and asked what we had made.
“It’s a paste.” My friend said.
“Does it taste like Nutella?” he asked.
“No.” I said, bemused.
Then my husband scooped out a spoonful. “It’s… interesting.” he said, taking a bite. That pretty much sums it up. I may try to whip them up into some brownies and see what happens, at this point I don’t think I can make it worse.
Til next time!
Next week : Alfajores
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Oh, sorry for your troubles! I hate skinning hazelnuts and only decide to make this recipe when I found a bag of pre-skinned,nuts. I had to add more oil and the texture was still thicker and gritter than Nutella, but I loved it!
Sorry this didn’t work out or you. I made it with peanuts and it took a while for them to really liquify, but it was worth it.
Using peanuts sounds like a very tasty switch!
I removed the skins after I roasted them, not sure if that made a difference, but the skins came off easily. It DID take forever though.
Oh no! I’m sorry the baking soda trick didn’t work. The skins don’t exactly fall off by themselves when I do it, but there’s no real work needed. I do have to do a quick swipe of almost every nut… no getting around that.
I have a friend who makes hers using coconut oil. So good. And I think the only way to get a perfect texture is a Vitamix and then a fine strainer.
It will probably make some awesome brownies! Sorry you had problems.
It did end up making some pretty decent brownies, fortunately 🙂
Sorry it didn’t turn out. But it makes me wonder how nutella can get their hazelnuts so smooth???
That will make great brownies! It already looks like the perfect batter. 😉
I thought so too! It actually did make ok brownies, not the best I’ve ever had but certainly respectable. 🙂
i’ve made peanutella before from smitten kitchen and the same thing happened – disaster. this worked out for me though, not sure what the difference was!
A peanut version sounds amazing, but I think I may wait awhile before trying something like this again 😉