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Tiziana Costamagna
Reverse Chocolates: Piemontese Gianduiotti-filled chocolates (1/2 Milk, 1/2 Dark)
Reverse Chocolates: Piemontese Gianduiotti-filled chocolates (1/2 Milk, 1/2 Dark)
Discovering these delicious treats was one of the chocolate highlights of our year. Melt-in-your-mouth chocolate enrobes the gianduja - a blend of chocolate and hazelnuts (Gianduiotti translates as "small pieces of gianduja"). These ingot-shaped chocolates are classically wrapped in foil - dark for the dark chocolates, regular foil for the milk chocolates - and were invented in the mid 1800s in Torino (Piemonte, Italy)
Their history is intriguing - with Napoleon's Continental Blockade in the early 1800s, cocoa became scarce and expensive. To survive, chocolatiers began stretching their chocolates with their local, abundant crop of hazelnuts, creating a very high-end version of Nutella.
But wait, there's more!
Gianduja is not just a confection, it is the name of a well-known figure in Piemontese Commedia dell'Arte - an everyman sort of role - happy, wine-loving, witty and outspoken.
During the 1865 Turin Carnival, a producer of this popular confection decided to invest in what we'd call a sponsorship and needed a 'hook' to draw attention to their chocolates. They found that special hook in a character dressed as Gianduja, the region's most recognizable theater character, who handed out their chocolates named for the character, Gianduja. Ever since, producers making this distinctive ingot-shaped confection have named it 'Gianduiotti' - "Little Gianduja Pieces".
Though the basic recipe pre-dates the official 1865 introduction of Gianduiotti, it is this foil-'ingot' that has defined this confection for the last 150+ years.
