Chocolate hazelnut spread
The best-known commercial spread contains 13 per cent hazelnuts and more than half sugar. A homemade one reverses those proportions — here more than half is nuts — and asks for only one thing you need patience for: the nuts must be blended for ten minutes. For the first five it looks like failure, because you get dry rubble. Then the oil comes out of the cells and the mass suddenly turns liquid.
Your own work in that: 17 min.
- Roasting the nuts 15 min
- Blending 12 min
- Chocolate 10 min
- Jarring 5 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneRoast the hazelnuts
Roast the nuts for 12–15 minutes at 175°C, until the skins split and they smell strongly. Roasting is not optional — a raw hazelnut tastes bland and gives up the oil this whole recipe depends on far less readily.
Ingredients: 400 g hazelnuts · ½ tsp salt
Skins split, nuts fragrant — they are ready.Rub off the skins in a tea towel
Wrap the hot nuts in a towel and rub hard for a minute. Not everything has to come off — a few bits of skin do no harm, but if a lot remains the spread will taste distinctly bitter.
Ingredients: 400 g hazelnuts · ½ tsp salt
Blend for a full ten minutes
Blend the nuts alone with the salt. They pass through stages: crumbs, wet sand, thick paste and finally liquid butter. Halfway through it looks hopeless and it is easy to lose heart — keep going and do not add oil, the nuts have enough of their own. Every 2–3 minutes stop the machine and scrape down the sides.
Ingredients: 400 g hazelnuts · ½ tsp salt
The sand only turns liquid after several minutes.Melt the chocolate and cool it
Melt the chocolate over a water bath and cool it to about 35°C. The nut butter is already warm from the long blending; hot chocolate would heat it further, and an overheated spread separates more easily and takes longer to thicken.
Ingredients: 200 g dark chocolate · 30 g cocoa · 100 g icing sugar · 40 g milk powder · 3 tbsp oil · 1 tsp vanilla extract
Combine everything in the processor
Pour the chocolate into the nut butter, add the cocoa, icing sugar, milk powder and vanilla and blend for 2 minutes. If the mixture is too stiff, add oil one spoonful at a time — two is usually enough.
Ingredients: 200 g dark chocolate · 30 g cocoa · 100 g icing sugar · 40 g milk powder · 3 tbsp oil · 1 tsp vanilla extract
Chocolate at 35°C, no hotter.Jar it and do not refrigerate
Transfer to jars and keep at room temperature, not in the fridge. The spread contains cocoa butter, which sets hard in the cold, and the spread stops spreading. It keeps up to a month in the cupboard.
Ingredients: 200 g dark chocolate · 30 g cocoa · 100 g icing sugar · 40 g milk powder · 3 tbsp oil · 1 tsp vanilla extract
Before you start
If the spread is grainy
It means the nuts were blended too briefly or the chocolate was too hot. Keep blending — after another three minutes most of the grit disappears. Do not swap icing sugar for granulated: the crystals will not dissolve in fat and the spread stays gritty.
Milk powder is worth it
It gives a milky mildness and takes the flavour closer to the shop version. Without it you get a distinctly more bitter, nuttier spread — both are good, but different enough to be worth choosing deliberately.
Without a food processor
A jug blender copes, but with 400 g of nuts it will overheat. Work in 200 g batches and rest it a minute for every two minutes of running.