Nuts about the palm oil spread

A recipe for home-made Nutella

When my family moved from Moscow to Washington DC, we were ripe for food experiences - of any kind, having been like the rest of the populace utterly deprived. We had lived for four years off cabbage, potatoes, and meat from the local markets that had been butchered with a hatchet and a chainsaw, so came replete with shards of bone. Sometimes the butchers didn’t show up, and then we only had cabbage and potatoes. Fish was sawn off frozen blocks of unscaled and ungutted varieties large and small, iced together. I made fish fingers from them, British journalists, unlike our counterparts from other nations, being denied access to our embassy's commissary on account of the Soviet Union apparently not registering as a hardship post.

There was, of course, a wider choice of produce - of glorious vegetables and fruits from Georgia. But you needed a budget to match. I telexed the foreign editor of the liberal national British newspaper which had sent us en poste to Moscow, a newspaper which prided itself on empathising with the Common Man. I explained that because cauliflowers cost 20 roubles/$20 a kilo, we needed to renegotiate our food allowance to match the budget of every other correspondent or join them in the import of weekly supplies from Helsinki. The plight of the Common Woman apparently less appreciated, he messaged back the helpful suggestion: “So don’t buy cauliflower.” Cauliflower was the only vegetable available at the time.

The girls were 4 and 6, impressionable ages to hit American supermarkets and the fridges and store cupboards of their school friends’ houses. One of the first products they encountered - and the most immediately seductive - was Nutella. 

I was persuaded by the underhand means universally practised by cunning children of tears, of stamping of feet and a refusal to eat, to stock our own supply, in order not to expose them to their playtime friends as the victims of utter deprivation. I kept it for special occasions on an upper shelf of a cabinet that required the awkward navigation of a weighty stool round the invasive island unit to achieve access.

One afternoon, I reached up to fetch the full jar to make sandwiches for the latest bunch of after-school squealers. Lifting it off the shelf, my hand shot up and bashed against the roof of the cupboard, a motion similar to the miscounting of steps down a staircase that causes the ankles to fold on the floor. Confused, I opened the Nutella and found the insides completely hollowed out, but for a thin and unbroken smear that lined the glass and which had convinced me the jar was full.

No-one could disagree with children that Nutella is an ambrosia of total delight. Melted chocolate praline to spread over bread? What’s not to love. Toasted filberts, another name for the nut of the Corylus avellana, are amongst the most seductive of nuts and yes - no surprise to regular Tabled readers - really really old.

Large-scale Mesolithic nut processing seems to have taken place around 8000 years ago, on, of all miniscule and isolated locations, the island of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. (If you want a break, a skim through this video is heart-lifting…) The evidence was a large shallow pit discovered in 1995 filled with hundreds of thousands of burned hazelnut shells. Anyone who has holidayed in the Highlands & Islands in summer will not dispute this is highly credible, having been eaten alive by the midges that swarm in hazelnut groves all across Scotland.

But there aren’t enough Scottish hazels to compete with Georgia in export terms. As of this January, that country’s Ministry of the Environment Protection and Agriculture of Georgia reported 15,300 tons of them going abroad, amounting to $79.2 million-worth, a massive 51.2% increase on 2020. Picture this in trucking terms: 4165 tons delivered to Germany, 3766 tons to Italy, 716 tons to the Czech Republic, 442 tons to Lithuania, 430 tons to Spain, 376 tons to Poland, 359 tons to France, 345 tons to Bulgaria, 128 tons to Latvia, 97 tons to Greece, 88 tons to Estonia, 86 tons to Slovakia, 84 tons to Luxembourg, 44 tons to Belgium, 22 tons to Austria, and 10 tons to Croatia. Nuts! wouldn’t you agree? What makes the figures even more remarkable is that it is Turkey, not Georgia, which grows nearly 70% of global supply. And that Ferrero, makers of those gold-wrapped chocolate balls and, you guessed it, the Nutella they’re stuffed with, uses 25% of that world supply. I can’t do the maths (Tabled reader Russell has already very discreetly indicated as much), but it seems to me with these enormous quantities being shipped about, millions of people must be eating something hazelnutty at some point of the day.

Nutella is not one of the most child-friendly foods among them. Migrant child labour was discovered by a 2019 BBC programme to be employed on many of Turkey’s hazelnut orchards. Nor is it good for children as consumers. Not only is Nutella very high in sugar but it’s very high in palm oil, modified to encourage its spreadability and containing a significant quantity of saturated fats.

Palm oil is an unhealthy ingredient for anyone. But it’s also not a healthy ingredient for the environment. For years, it came from plantations whose management had an enormous impact on deforestation. The pesticides this management required released effluents into the soil and water, endangering the lives of the rhinoceros, elephants, orangutans, Sumatran tigers, and more. 

Nestlé, which buys thousands of tons of palm oil a year, had aimed to achieve 100% deforestation-free palm oil by 2020. But so far has managed only 70%. The company blames “hard to reach smallholders”. However, smallholders are responsible for 40% of palm oil’s global production.

Nestlé’s new goal is to reach 100% by 2022, which they say poses challenges revealed in an interactive promotion video you might get any young Nutella fans you know to engage with. But it’s important to their bottom line to do so because company research has established that millennials check labels to verify the presence of palm oil, with one in five avoiding products containing it. That’s a lot of shoppers.

Following a wide public campaign, makers of Nutella have now committed to a supply of palm oil from sustainable sources. Which is good news. But it doesn’t affect the amount of sugar employed in the spread’s creation.

Nutella’s deliciousness can’t be ignored, however. 

We’re about to enter hazelnut season, so you can easily make your own spread, without using sugar and certainly no palm oil, sustainable or otherwise. Enough spread for a good sized jar will only take you half an hour to compose, start to finish. A supply of it is good to have around, not just to keep your children on side, but it makes a delectable icing for a cake.

150g/5½ oz hazelnuts (dried, not just off the tree fresh and milky)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons good-flavoured honey
1 tablespoon unsweetened quality cocoa powder
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
250g/½ lb 70% chocolate, broken up

Preheat oven to 175C/350F.

Toast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet in the oven for 10-12 minutes until they’ve browned a little and their skins blister. Pour them onto a kitchen towel, fold it over and rub enthusiastically to get rid of as much loose skin as possible. If you take it outside to open, you can blow the skins off. Otherwise, just try to keep the skin bits away from the exposed nuts. 

Cool the nuts then grind them in a blender or processor to form a paste. Add all the remaining ingredients except for the chocolate and blitz again until completely smooth.

Melt the chocolate in a saucepan over simmering water, stir until smooth and cool then add to the mix and blend again. Pour into sterilised jars. It will thicken as it cools. 

Then store on the highest shelf you have.

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