Making Homemade Nutella

When my daughters told me that they wanted Nutella crepes, I understood.  Nutella, the Italian chocolate hazelnut spread, is delicious.  Although Nutella comes mostly in plastic bottles, I was able to find it in a glass jar with a plastic cap: 

However, like my mustard experiment, I figured that there had to be a way to make it myself.  I found a recipe on the Splendid table website:

https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/homemade-nutella

The ingredients are simple enough:  hazelnuts, milk chocolate, icing sugar,cocoa, canola oil, vanilla, and salt.  

After roasting the hazelnuts in the oven, you rub the hazelnuts in a dishtowel to remove the skin. 

Then you puree them in a food processor until you obtain a fine powder.

The next step is melting the milk chocolate:

After melting the chocolate, you add all the ingredients and blend them together. 

Very easy indeed!  In terms of the finished product, the homemade Nutella is certainly more grainy and definitely tastes more like hazelnuts than the commercial Nutella.

I also thought that the homemade version was not sweet enough and I added another tablespoon of icing sugar.  The following day, the homemade Nutella had hardened significantly.

I was surprised that the recipe had not been tweaked better. It definitely needs quite a bit more oil to keep a consistency similar to that of Nutella. I would suggest increasing the canola oil from 2 to at least 5 TBSP.  This makes you realize how much oil is in the commercial product (and why it is the number one ingredient in the commercial formula).

How was it in the crepes?  As mentioned, the homemade Nutella had hardened and was a bit difficult to remove from the jar:

But once left for a few minutes in the folded hot crepes, the nutella melted:

Gooey and rich with real hazelnut flavor, the family consensus was that the homemade nutella was delicious. I also used the nutella in homemade chocolate scones as a filling. It worked very well in this as well. While the recipe needs some finetuning, we all agreed that it was worth making again.

Challenge for the Week:  Give the homemade Nutella a try!