Homemade Nutella

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Who can resist Nutella? The chocolate-hazelnut spread seems to be as ubiquitous in Europe as peanut butter is here, and for good reason. It's delicious! But Nutella is kind of pricey, and here in the US it's distributed by Nestlé, a company which we try to avoid.

Thank goodness for David Lebovitz, who is a pastry chef, blogger, and creator and compiler of delicious recipes. We've made some of his recommendations before. Can't remember what at the moment, but I'm positive it was delicious. Ooh, wait, no, here it is: Strawberry Frozen Yogurt. Will be making that the very moment I get the mixer out of the shop and get the ice-cream maker frozen again.

David's recipe for Nutella came out of a French cookbook, the Encyclopédie du Chocolat. It wasn't hard, but like any good kitchen project, it required a shopping trip, used lots of pans AND the food processor (which I hate washing), and kind of made a mess.

So. Let's do it.

Melt chocolate. Warm milk and honey.
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Toast hazelnuts; remove skins. (We used all hazelnuts, omitting the almonds called for in the original recipe - because we'd bought too many hazelnuts).
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Blend hazelnuts into oblivion (I didn't have any issues with texture or not having the hazelnuts be chunky; then again my food processor is kind of a behemoth).
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Add chocolate. Add milk. Blend like crazy (this step probably would have been better in the blender, but who wants to wash another appliance?)
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Pour into jars. Make crepes. Eat all the Nutella that didn't fit into jars on crepes.
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And now, the hard part. Try to forget the jar of nutella in the refrigerator, coupled with the fact that you own spoons and could just eat it out of the jar any time you want. Oops. Already failed on that one today.

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