Organic Whole Milk Cat's Tongues Filled with Nougat

Cat tongues with a nougat center from Berger Confiserie, nutty and tender

Berger Confiserie's Organic Whole Milk Cat's Tongues Filled with Nougat are thin chocolate tongues with a soft center of roasted hazelnuts and almonds. The shell melts first, then comes the nougat, and each tongue lies on its own in the box, just big enough for one bite.

Organic Whole Milk Cat's Tongues Filled with Nougat are Berger Confiserie's filled tongues from Lofer, in Salzburg's Saalach Valley. The 110-gram box holds thin milk chocolate tongues with 37 percent cocoa, filled with a nut paste of roasted organic hazelnuts and organic almonds, finely rolled and filled one by one.

Tender shell, warm nut center

The thin milk chocolate shell melts quickly, and then the center has its say, warm with roasted hazelnut and with a marzipan-like sweetness underneath.

Because there is so much nut paste to so little chocolate, the filled piece tastes distinctly nuttier than a bar of the same variety. The almond stays in the background and rounds things off, while the hazelnut sets the roasted tone.

The whole thing stays creamy rather than sticky and has vanished completely after two or three seconds in the mouth. The appeal of the slim shape lies in counting them out. With a bar, you first have to negotiate how big a piece may be. If you tend to lose yourself when nibbling, here you get away with a clear stopping point.

What nougat means in our part of the world

In the Alpine region, nougat means the soft paste of roasted nuts, sugar and cocoa butter, not the white almond confection of Provence.

It was invented in Turin, when Napoleonic blockades made cocoa scarce and confectioners stretched what was left with hazelnuts.

Necessity gave rise to a genre of its own, one that to this day puts the nutty flavor above the cocoa and has long been as much a given in the Alpine region as marzipan is in the north. For a smooth paste, the roasted kernels are rolled until the particles are smaller than the tongue can still make out individually.

Filled rather than poured

Filling a tongue takes more steps than pouring a bar, because the shell and the center are tempered separately and poured one after the other.

At Berger Confiserie on Schokoladenweg in Lofer, the nuts for the paste are roasted and rolled in-house. The paste then goes in portions into the pre-poured tongues, which a second pour closes again. The cocoa butter sets in a fine crystal form, which gives the shell its clean gloss and quiet snap. Poured without a filling, the same chocolate comes as Organic Whole Milk Cat's Tongues in the flat box.

With espresso and on the dessert board

Placed beside an espresso, served with dessert wine or as a small praline after a meal, the filled tongue finds its place without anyone needing a plate.

On a board next to cheese and dried fruit, the little piece makes a sweet ending, and on the saucer it turns a coffee into a little break. As a gift, it needs no more than a ribbon around the flat box, since the packaging does the work for you anyway.

Keep the box cool and dry, away from strongly scented neighbors, and let it come up to room temperature briefly before nibbling, because that is when the center is at its softest. Whatever else Berger Confiserie sends out from Lofer, from the plain bar to the filled one, you'll find in the Berger range.

Organic control number AT-BIO-301 – EU/non-EU agriculture