A slab of white almond nougat broken into rough shards on a wooden board, toasted almonds showing in the broken faces, beside a small bowl of honey, a scatter of whole almonds and an espresso cup

Torrone and Nougat: The Complete Guide

Italy calls it torrone, Spain turrón, France nougat, and underneath the three names sits one confection: honey and sugar cooked until they will set, packed with toasted nuts. It can be brittle enough to need a heavy knife or soft enough to bend, white or dark, studded with almonds, hazelnuts or pistachios. Four places hold an EU geographical indication for theirs, and the specifications behind them show exactly where the versions part. For making a batch at home, the honey torrone recipe is the companion piece.

What torrone is

The French specification for Nougat de Montélimar gives a clean working definition: a white to cream-colored base paste, aerated with egg white and made from sweeteners, notably honey, plus a filling of almonds, sometimes with pistachios. Not every version uses all three parts. Italy's protected Torrone di Bagnara is made from honey, sugar, unpeeled roasted almonds, cinnamon and ground clove, and its definition lists no egg white.

Each part does its own job. The sweetener sets the flavor and, with the cooking, the texture. Egg white, where it goes in, sets the color and the lightness: beaten to peaks and folded into hot syrup, it turns a honey caramel pale and airy. The nuts carry almost everything else, and the Spanish and French specifications each fix a minimum for them. Every protected recipe calls for toasted or roasted nuts, and the Montélimar rules ask for almonds roasted golden to the core without scorching the outside.

Where it came from

The Spanish specification for Turrón de Alicante does not claim the invention for Spain. It credits Arabs or Jews, through their cooking customs, with introducing a paste it names as halva or al-lajú to the town then called Sexona, now Jijona, in the province of Alicante, and with teaching local people to use sugar, honey and nuts. The specification traces turrón's written record in Valencia to the fifteenth century: it cites a satirical poem by Jaume Roig, Lo Spill, from around 1460, and a 1484 document in the archives of the city of Valencia. Jijona is still the production zone for both of Spain's protected turrones, the hard Alicante and the soft Jijona.

France's story runs through Montélimar, in the Drôme. Honey and almond nougat first appears in the town's archives in 1701, when Montélimar presented a quintal of it to a grandson of Louis XIV. The makers' specification names Philip V of Spain; France's official tourism site names his brothers, the dukes of Burgundy and Berry, on their way back from Spain. In the twentieth century the Route Nationale 7, the main holiday road to the south of France, ran through the town, and the specification records 22 nougat makers of the period with up to a hundred shops along the road, an era it says ended when the A7 motorway opened in 1968. France's tourism site counts 13 makers producing Nougat de Montélimar today, among them the house of Soubeyran, founded in 1837 and described as the oldest family firm still in business.

Cremona's origin story is told as tradition rather than record. A pastry cook, it goes, created torrone for the wedding of Bianca Maria Visconti and Francesco Sforza in Cremona in the fifteenth century, as a homage to the Torrazzo, the city's bell tower and symbol. The city's November Festa del Torrone stages the wedding again each year.

Hard or soft: the syrup decides

The difference between a torrone that snaps and one that yields comes down largely to how the sugar is cooked: how hot, how long, and how much moisture is left. The Montélimar specification spells out the heat for makers using an open cauldron. The honey base is cooked no higher than 100°C, the egg whites are beaten to peaks, and the sugar syrup is taken to a temperature chosen for the texture wanted before everything is combined and cooked slowly.

Sugar syrup cooked to (open cauldron) In Fahrenheit Result
110 to 145°C 230 to 293°F Soft nougat, chewy and yielding
145 to 160°C 293 to 320°F Hard nougat, crisp and brittle

The same rules cap glucose syrup at 25 percent of the sweeteners' dry weight in soft Montélimar and 35 percent in hard.

The Spanish pair works another way. Turrón de Alicante is the hard one: toasted almonds set into a hardened, whitened mass. Turrón de Jijona starts from the same base, which is cooled in sheets, ground in stone mills, refined until almost fluid, then cooked again with more roasted almonds in a vessel called a boixet. The Spanish trade agency describes the result as smooth and velvety in the mouth, reminiscent of peach skin.

Four protected nougats compared

Set side by side, the four specifications part ways on nut content, on honey, and on what else may go in.

Turrón de Alicante Turrón de Jijona Nougat de Montélimar Torrone di Bagnara
Made in Jijona, province of Alicante, Spain Jijona, province of Alicante, Spain 14 communes around Montélimar, Drôme, France Bagnara Calabra, province of Reggio Calabria, Italy
Nuts, minimum 60% almonds in Suprema, 46% in Extra 64% almonds in Suprema, 50% in Extra 30% almonds, or 28% almonds plus 2% pistachio Unpeeled roasted almonds, no minimum stated in the registration notice
Honey, minimum 10% 10% 25% of the sweeteners' dry weight Honey with sugar
Defining rules Toasted almonds set in a hard white mass; cinnamon flavor permitted Almonds ground into the paste; second cooking with more almonds Egg white the only aerator; no additives Cinnamon and clove; coated in granulated sugar or bitter cocoa; two historic versions, Martiniana and Torrefatto glassato

Spain grades its protected turrón into two categories, Suprema and Extra, by minimum almond content. France sets no grades and instead fixes a floor for almonds and honey and a short list of what may go in. Italy's protected torrone, registered in 2014, is defined by its spices, a coating of granulated sugar or bitter cocoa, and two historic versions, Martiniana and Torrefatto glassato.

Italy's regional torrone

Beyond Bagnara, torrone is made from Cremona in Lombardy to Abruzzo, Benevento near Naples, Calabria, Sardinia and Sicily. Benevento's version was historically known as cupedia. Abruzzo's bring in candied fruit and cinnamon, and Sardinian torrone runs sweet and chewy. Hazelnuts, walnuts and pistachios can all join the almond. In Piedmont, hazelnut country, the nut takes other forms, the story told in the Piedmont in autumn guide to the region's hazelnuts and gianduja.

In Bronte, near Etna in Sicily, three childhood friends, Antonino Caruso and the brothers Pietro and Giuseppe Bellitto, opened a small nougat workshop in 1997 after working in local pastry shops and bars. That workshop became Brontedolci. Its Brontoncini (shop Brontedolci Brontoncini) are small soft nougats of Sicilian almonds, Sicilian sulla honey, egg white and pistachio, each coated in chocolate. The Brontedolci producer guide covers the founders and the town.

Reading the label

On a torrone label, honey appears by name, and the kind of honey shapes the flavor; orange blossom, sulla and wildflower each leave a different note, and the honey guide explains why. Glucose syrup is a permitted ingredient even in the Montélimar recipe, within set limits for both soft and hard nougat.

When a bar has a thin white sheet on top and bottom, it is edible wafer, pain azyme in French and oblea in Spanish. The Montélimar rules describe it as an unleavened sheet made mainly from plant starch and water, sometimes with vegetable oil. The Alicante specification explains why it is there: it keeps bars and pieces from sticking to one another and to fingers when warmth and humidity soften the sugar.

How to cut, serve and use it

Hard torrone breaks more cleanly than it saws. A heavy chef's knife set on the slab and tapped firmly on the spine with the heel of a hand splits it along a clean line. Soft torrone slices with a warm, dry knife. After that, the style decides the use.

Style At the table In the kitchen
Hard white almond, Alicante type Thin shards with espresso or a glass of sweet wine Crushed over ice cream or folded into semifreddo
Soft ground-almond, Jijona type Small squares with coffee Melted into warm milk; spread thin on toast
Soft Montélimar type Cut in fingers on a cheese board beside blue cheese Chopped into a baked apple or pear
Spiced and coated, Bagnara type Broken pieces with a digestif Grated over a chocolate dessert
Chocolate-coated soft pieces Straight from the box after dinner Halved on top of a plain cake

The Montélimar rules recognize nougat as an ingredient in its own right: brisures, broken nougat graded between 1.6 and 15 millimeters, which the specification links to ice cream, chocolates and nougat cream. For the sugar stages torrone shares with other confections, the caramel guide goes further.

How to keep it

Torrone is mostly sugar, honey and nuts, and its two weaknesses are the ones the wafer answers: warmth and damp. Wrapped and kept in a closed tin somewhere cool and dry, it holds its texture. A humid kitchen makes the surface tacky, and a warm one softens hard torrone toward chewiness. Chocolate-coated pieces follow chocolate's rules, set out in the guide to why chocolate turns white. The nuts are the part that ages, and the date on the box is the maker's guide to when they are at their best.

Three short answers

Why is some nougat white and some dark? White nougat is honey whipped with beaten egg white; black nougat is cooked over high heat, stirred hard for about 45 minutes, until the honey caramelizes. Bagnara's torrone can also be finished in bitter cocoa. Why does torrone appear at Christmas? It is a Christmastime sweet in Spain and across the Mediterranean, and Cremona holds its torrone festival in November, at the start of the season. Can soft torrone go hard? It can firm up as it dries out; kept sealed, it stays soft.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

Back to blog

Shop this story

Shop this story (1)

Keep reading

More from The Pantry Dispatch