Crunchy chocolate hazelnuts (white, milk or dark)
Ingredients
- 400 g sugar
- 1 a good pinch of salt
- 400 g skinless hazelnuts or almonds
- 1 kg chocolate
- 6 c. soup unsweetened cocoa powder
Instructions
- Pour the sugar and salt with 70g of water into a large frying pan. Heat over high heat to boiling.
- Pour in the hazelnuts (unroasted). I've used unskinned raw hazelnuts here, but you can also use almonds.
- Stirring constantly and lowering the heat slightly, cook the hazelnuts, which will gradually roast naturally.
- At some point, the syrup will crystallize, and this is perfectly normal.
- Separate the hazelnuts and continue to make the outer layer turn to caramel.
- You don't want all the sugar to melt into caramel, otherwise it will make a caramel sheet and the hazelnuts won't be able to separate. It's time to stop. There should just be a thin layer of caramel on top of the hazelnuts. Pour onto a baking tray lined with baking parchment and leave to cool.
- Meanwhile, temper the chocolate. First, melt the chocolate evenly at 42°C. The simplest method for tempering is Mycryo cocoa butter, which I add when the chocolate is at 34.7°C.I've written a book on chocolate from bean to bar, published by Solar, in which I explain all the more traditional tempering methods. But mycryo cocoa butter is a cocoa butter powder already in the right form, and it will temper the rest of the chocolate through seeding. I have some white chocolate here that I made with my concheuses. but it's perfectly possible to use good-quality store-bought chocolate, and choose the color (dark, milk, white).
- This is my new toy. This is a drum that fits onto the kitchenaid food processor. It will rotate at an angle, allowing the dried fruit to be coated with chocolate. Pour in the caramelized hazelnuts.
- Put the food processor on first speed, then pour in the tempered chocolate, until it reaches 29°C. I started with 3-4 ladles.
- The machine will coat and start-up is a bit tedious. Stay in front and occasionally scrape the inside of the drum.
- At times, I took the hazelnuts out of the drum to leave them alone so that the chocolate could crystallize a little more.
- Then add the chocolate gradually, retempering if necessary.
- At the end, when all the chocolate had been poured in and crystallized, I added some cocoa powder (4-5 tablespoons).
- When finished, pour into a dish and leave to crystallize perfectly at room temperature.
- Then store them in an airtight tin. Hazelnuts will keep for several weeks.
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