FOOD NEWS
What Is Gianduia And What Does It Have To Do With Nutella?
By Christina Garcia
Nutella has a food relative, so to speak, with a hyped reputation for being even more delicious than the famous chocolate hazelnut spread. Gianduia, a mature member of the Nutella family tree, is also a chocolate hazelnut treat made up of dark chocolate and 30% hazelnuts, but while Nutella became famous, gianduia stayed closer to home.
Gianduia is a sticky chocolate hazelnut paste with deep roots in the Piedmont region of Italy, where hazelnuts grow abundantly, and in commedia dell'arte, a character named Gianduia represented the Piedmont area. In 1865, the legend goes that Caffarel, a manufacturer of a new form of Gianduia, used Carnival as the occasion to have people dressed as the commedia dell'arte character pass out morsels of the sweet.
Popularly spread on a slice of bread as a snack, the recipe was made to be more easily spreadable by Ferrero and marketed as Supercrema, at which point the famous hazelnuts were roasted before combined with chocolate, sugar, and oil. As Suprecrema was cheaper than chocolate, it was helpful for a post-war population struggling to afford luxuries, and a rebrand eventually gave new life to Supercrema, creating the new name — Nutella — in 1964.