Praline paste

Praliné

What it is

The name belongs to a seventeenth-century marshal, du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is credited — the story goes — with dropping almonds into boiling sugar at Montargis. The paste came much later, when someone ground the cooled sweets, and it is that grinding rather than the caramel that made it a pastry ingredient.

In the kitchen

It separates in the tub like nut butter — stir the risen oil back in before you weigh, or the ganache is short of fat one day and swimming in it the next. Standard is fifty-fifty nuts to sugar; a sixty-forty runs looser and tastes far less sweet.

Goes with

Milk chocolate Dark chocolate Hazelnut Cream Coffee Feuilletine

Same species

Cervione hazelnut Fresh green hazelnut Gianduja Hazelnut Hazelnut flour Hazelnut oil

Also used with

Edible gold leaf

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