Torrone di Bagnara

Torrone di Bagnara is honey, sugar and whole unpeeled almonds, spiced, cast into bars and cut into slabs. Its IGP status, granted in 2014, makes it the only Italian nougat with EU protection, and neither Cremona nor Benevento, the two names everyone knows, carries a European mark on its torrone.

Two decisions set it apart, and no other Italian nougat district makes both. The first is the unpeeled almond. The skins stay on, bringing a tannic bitterness that pushes back against the honey. Cremona and Benevento always blanch, because they want a clean pale interior; Bagnara leaves the almonds as they are, which is why a cut slab shows dark flecks instead of a white mosaic.

The second is structure. The Bagnara method does not build the mass on whipped egg white, which is the foundation of both the Lombard and the Campanian schools. Here the binder is sugar cooked with honey, and the result is dense, compact and brittle in a clean-snapping way rather than aerated or chewy.

There are two types and it is worth knowing which you are buying. The Martiniana is coated in bitter cocoa and cinnamon, with cloves in the mix: dark, spiced, with a bitter finish. The Torrefatto glassato is toasted in the oven and then coated in a sugar syrup that vitrifies as it cools into a thin, matte, crackling shell.

Darker and much less sweet than any nougat most people have met. The honey is the dominant flavour, not sugar, and the almond skins add a dry bitterness underneath it that keeps the whole thing from cloying.

The Martiniana leads with cocoa and cinnamon on the outside, powdery and slightly dusty on the lips, before the honey and clove arrive. The finish is genuinely bitter, closer to dark chocolate than to a confection. The Torrefatto glassato is the sweeter of the two, but the oven toasting takes the almonds to a roasted, nearly coffee-like depth and the glaze shatters instead of dissolving.

Texture is dense and brittle. There is no give and no chew: it breaks cleanly and the almonds crunch. If a piece is spongy, aerated or sticks to your teeth, it belongs to a different tradition.

Eat it as it comes, in small pieces, at the end of a meal or with coffee in the afternoon. It is dense and spiced, so twenty or thirty grams per person is a serving.

Serve it at room temperature. Straight from the fridge it turns unpleasantly hard and loses its aroma, a mistake people make in summer, when the instinct is to keep it cool.

Cut it with a smooth-bladed knife warmed under hot water and dried. A serrated knife crumbles a mass this compact, and on the Martiniana it takes the cocoa coating off with it.

In the kitchen, the best use is as granella: roughly chopped over fiordilatte gelato or folded into a semifreddo, where it brings crunch, almond and spice at once. Crumbled over fresh sheep's ricotta with a thread of honey it makes a dessert in five minutes.

The Martiniana also holds up in a savoury context, not traditional in Calabria, but it works. Shave it over aged pecorino, where the bitter cocoa bridges the honey and the salt.

Room temperature, somewhere cool and dry, in its own wrapper or a closed container. Six to eight months for the Torrefatto glassato, a little less for the Martiniana, whose cocoa coating takes up surrounding smells readily. The date on the wrapper is the producer's own.

Damp is the real variable. Torrone is hygroscopic: in a humid room the surface turns tacky, the glaze loses its glassy set and the cocoa coating cakes into a paste. An airtight container handles nearly all of that. Skip the fridge, where the cold hardens the sugar and honey mass past the point where it eats well, and the condensation that forms as it returns to room temperature marks the surface of both versions.

Above 25°C (77°F) the bars soften and stick to each other, so in summer keep them separated with sheets of baking paper. Freezing is possible with no real gain: room-temperature storage covers the whole useful life. What sets the limit is the almonds, whose oil slowly oxidises and flattens the roasted note.

Look at the cut face. The almonds should be whole, plentiful and still wearing their dark skins: a white, uniform mosaic inside means blanched almonds and a different method from the one used in Bagnara.

Weigh a bar in your hand. This torrone is heavy for its size, because no whipped egg white has put air into it. A light bar riddled with small holes belongs to the soft Cremona and Alba school, which is the version most shops abroad stock.

On the Martiniana, check the coating: it should be a powder of cocoa and cinnamon that sticks to your fingers, not a smooth glossy chocolate shell. Chocolate coating is the signature of the Benevento torroncini, not of this product. On the Torrefatto glassato, the surface should be matte, thin and slightly uneven, and it should crack under the teeth. A thick, shiny, perfectly even glaze is an industrial coating.

Last, look for the IGP mark and the words Torrone di Bagnara on the wrapper. The word torrone on its own guarantees nothing.

In Bagnara itself, from the handful of family workshops along the main street, at 25 to 40 euro a kilo. The Torrefatto glassato usually costs more than the Martiniana because the oven-toasting and glazing add a second full process. Single slabs run 4 to 8 euro depending on size.

Elsewhere in Italy, specialist grocers and the producers' own online shops add twenty to thirty per cent. Calabrian nougat that does not follow the IGP specification sits at 10 to 18 euro a kilo, and the gap is mostly almond percentage and how much of the honey has been replaced by plain sugar.

Abroad it is genuinely rare. Italian importers in the US carry it at roughly 18 to 30 dollars a pound; in the UK expect 30 to 50 pounds a kilo, usually only in Christmas gift boxes. Production is small and export has never been a priority for the town's workshops.

Check the wrapper for the IGP mark and the words Torrone di Bagnara. The word torrone on its own guarantees nothing, and plenty of Calabrian nougat has no connection to the specification.

Bagnara Calabra is a town of a few thousand people on the Costa Viola, the stretch of Tyrrhenian coast between Scilla and Palmi in the province of Reggio Calabria, built on two levels linked by steep flights of steps. The nougat workshops are almost all on the main street and sell directly; ask to see the laboratory and they will usually show you.

December is the moment, when production peaks for Christmas and both types fill the windows. Easter is the second peak.

The coast justifies the trip on its own. Scilla is eight kilometres away, with the fishermen's quarter of Chianalea built on the water and the Ruffo castle on the headland; Palmi lies the other way, looking across the Strait to Sicily and, on clear days, to the Aeolian islands. Bagnara is historically a swordfish town, and in summer that is the other half of its identity.

Reggio Calabria, where the Riace Bronzes are, is half an hour down the line on one of the most spectacular stretches of coastal railway in Italy.