Torrone

Torrone is the Italian branch of the Mediterranean nougat family: the same lineage as Spanish turrón and French nougat de Montélimar, all three descended from Arab confections of honey and almonds that spread across the western Mediterranean. The base is short: honey, sugar, whipped egg white, toasted nuts, vanilla and lemon zest, poured into moulds lined with ostia, a paper-thin unleavened wafer that stays on the finished bar.

The one distinction worth learning is hard versus soft. It comes down to two things moving together: the ratio of honey to sugar, and how long the mix cooks. More honey and eight to twelve hours in a double boiler drives off water, crystallises the mass and produces a glassy bar that shatters. More sugar and a three-to-five-hour cook leaves it pliable and chewy. Both are traditional, both are sold everywhere in Italy, and nobody considers one the corrupted version of the other.

A third format matters as much as the two above: torroncini, single-bite pieces enrobed in dark chocolate. In the province of Benevento these are the default rather than a novelty, and if you have only ever met torrone as a white bar you have met half the subject.

Torrone is overwhelmingly a Christmas product. Italian supermarkets stack it from early November and clear it by mid-January, and the artisan producers who work year-round do most of their volume in six weeks.

Honey first, and much more of it than the pale colour suggests. A good hard torrone hits with floral sweetness, then the toasted almond takes over and turns nutty and slightly bitter at the finish. The sugar is present but not the point: cheap torrone tastes flatly sweet precisely because the honey has been cut back.

The texture is the shock for most first-timers. Hard torrone is genuinely hard: it does not yield, it fractures, and it slowly dissolves against the roof of the mouth over a minute or more, releasing almond oil as it goes. Soft torrone behaves like a dense marshmallow with the chew of taffy and will stick to your molars in a companionable way.

The wafer contributes almost nothing to flavour and quite a lot to texture: a dry, faintly papery crackle that breaks the sweetness. Chocolate-coated torroncini are the easiest entry point for anyone raised on Western candy bars: bitter chocolate against honey and almond is a familiar equation.

Set against American nougat, torrone is far less sweet, far more aromatic, and vastly nuttier. Against a Snickers-style aerated nougat, it is a different food entirely.

First, how to cut it, because this is where people get hurt. Hard torrone is not bitten, it is cut. Lay the bar flat on a board, take a smooth-bladed chef's knife, never serrated, which shatters it. Warm the blade under hot water, dry it, and press straight down with your palm in a single motion. Ten minutes in the fridge beforehand makes it more brittle and gives you a cleaner break. Italians genuinely do damage fillings and crowns on this every December; the caution is not decorative.

Serve it in two-finger chunks at the end of a meal, with coffee or a sweet wine, alongside whatever else is on the Christmas table. Soft torrone slices normally and needs none of the above.

In the kitchen it earns its keep crumbled rather than melted. Roughly broken, it is the backbone of semifreddo al torrone: fold shards through semi-whipped cream and Italian meringue, freeze in a loaf tin, serve in slices with chocolate sauce. Finely chopped, stir it into vanilla ice cream at the end of churning, or through mascarpone cream for filling a pandoro. Crumbled over a blue cheese or a slice of foie gras it works as a savoury contrast.

Do not try to melt it. The honey caramelises, the nuts separate and you get a grainy mess. Add it cold, and add it late.

Torrone has two enemies, damp and heat. Keep it somewhere cool and dry, 15 to 20 °C, away from radiators, and out of the fridge for anything longer than a few hours, because the temperature swing condenses moisture on the surface and a hard bar turns sticky and dull. Sealed in its original wrapper or vacuum pack it holds eight to twelve months, and the date printed on the pack is the reference to work from. What moves across those months is the nuts: their oil oxidises slowly and the toasted note fades towards something flat.

Once opened, wrap the bar tight in cling film or greaseproof paper, close it in an airtight box and reckon on two or three weeks. The two styles drift towards each other as they exchange moisture with the air: soft torrone hardens, hard torrone softens. Chocolate coated torroncini are the most delicate, since temperature swings pull cocoa butter to the surface, where it recrystallises as a pale grey film and changes how the sweet looks. Do not freeze any of it: thawing brings condensation and the glassy structure of the hard style cracks.

Read the nut percentage first. Serious torrone runs 40 to 60 per cent almonds or hazelnuts; below 30 per cent you are mostly buying sugar. Then look for honey among the first ingredients rather than as a trace at the end: bars built on glucose syrup taste flatter and set stickier. The cut face tells the rest. In good hard torrone the almonds are whole and packed evenly through a white, compact paste that goes faintly translucent at the edges, while big air pockets, nuts sunk to the bottom or a dull beige tone come from rushed work.

The wafer, called ostia, stays on the bar. It should be thin, dry, tight to the surface and come away in one sheet; a gummy wafer means the bar picked up damp in a warehouse. On the shelf abroad its neighbours are French nougat de Montélimar, softer and often made with pistachios, and Spanish turrón, sold as the hard Alicante slab or the spreadable Jijona. At the top end, labels naming Nocciola del Piemonte IGP or Avola almonds say so. A 100 to 150 g bar runs about $9 to $16 or £7 to £12.

In the US, Italian importers and online grocers carry it seasonally from October: Eataly, Gustiamo and the specialist Italian food sites all list Cremona and Sannio producers, and most large Italian delis stock bars from November. Expect roughly $10 to $18 a pound for imported supermarket-grade bars and $20 to $30 a pound for artisan production with named almonds or Piedmont hazelnuts.

In the UK, Italian delicatessens, Sous Chef and the larger supermarkets' Christmas ranges carry it from late November, generally £3 to £5 for a 150 g bar and £20 to £35 per kilo for anything artisan. Spanish turrón is stocked more consistently than Italian torrone in both countries, which is worth knowing if you are shopping late.

Read the nut percentage before anything else. Above 40% is respectable, above 55% is excellent, below 30% means you are mostly buying sugar. Then check that honey appears near the top of the ingredient list rather than at the bottom. Named nuts (Nocciola del Piemonte IGP, almonds from Avola or Toritto) are declared explicitly when present.

One label to look for if you want the rarity: Torrone di Bagnara IGP, from Calabria, is the only Italian torrone with EU protected status, granted in 2014. It is made in small volumes and rarely leaves Italy.

Allergens, plainly: egg white and honey are in almost every traditional bar, so it is neither vegan nor suitable for infants under one. Chocolate-coated versions contain milk. Most torrone is gluten-free in its ingredients, but the wafer is made from wheat flour and water, so a bar with ostia is not.

Cremona, in Lombardy, an hour by train from Milan, is the pilgrimage. The Festa del Torrone takes over the old centre for a week every November: producers from across Italy, copper cauldrons cooking in the open, tastings on every corner, and a costumed re-enactment of the 1441 wedding procession of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti crossing the cathedral square beneath the Torrazzo, the tallest brick bell tower in Italy. The historic torronifici in town are open year-round if November does not suit.

For the other tradition, go south of Benevento in Campania to San Marco dei Cavoti, a hill village of about two thousand people where a pastry chef named Innocenzo Borrillo invented the chocolate-coated croccantino in 1891. Workshops on the main street still make it in view of the street, and the Sagra del Croccantino runs in early December. Benevento itself is worth the stop for the Roman arch and for Strega, the saffron-yellow liqueur made in the city since 1860.

Beyond the two capitals: Bagnara Calabra on the Calabrian coast for the only IGP torrone; Tonara in the Sardinian interior, where torrone is made with honey and egg white and no sugar at all, and the festival falls at Easter rather than Christmas; L'Aquila in Abruzzo for chewy chocolate torrone in production since 1835; Alba and the Langhe for hazelnut versions; and Sicily for almond torrone and cubbaita, the sesame-and-honey bar that is arguably the oldest form of all.