Chocolate with chestnuts by Tiroler Edle, mildly filled
Chocolate with chestnuts from Tiroler Edle is the company's winter bar, a milk chocolate over a velvety cream of chestnuts and cream. The filling tastes floury-sweet and earthy, much like the scent of hot roasted chestnuts in cold fingers.
Chocolate with chestnuts is the filled winter variety from Tiroler Edle in Landeck, Tyrol. Beneath the milk chocolate of the 100-gram bar sits a cream of chestnuts and cream, mild in tone and without any sharpness. It hits the shelves with the cold season and leaves again in the spring.
Floury sweetness, earthy tone, soft center
With the first piece, the light shell gives way, and beneath it waits the filling, soft rather than liquid.
Chestnut does not taste loud, but round, earthy, and a little floury, and it is precisely this flouriness that makes the filling so satisfying. The cream takes away the dryness that a pure chestnut always retains and turns the purée into a cream that slowly yields in the mouth.
Anyone who knows chestnuts from a winter street stall will recognize the taste immediately, only warmer and more softly bedded. The light couverture around it remains deliberately restrained so that the earthy tone is not lost under the cocoa.
Why the chestnut is the exception among nuts
The sweet chestnut is counted among the nuts, yet it behaves in the kitchen like a potato.
While other shelled fruits primarily provide fat, the chestnut consists mostly of starch and contains hardly any oil. That is why it can neither be cracked nor eaten raw, but must be boiled or roasted before it tastes like anything at all.
In the heat, this starch breaks down into sugar, and the hard kernel becomes a sweet, soft purée without any need for added sugar. This exact process is the beginning of every chestnut cream, in the confectionery as well as at the roasting stand. The bitterness of the brown inner skin, which would make every bite inedible raw, also disappears in the process.
A variety that comes with the season
Chestnuts fall in October, and until February, they define the cuisine in the Alpine region.
They are as much a part of the Törggelen in South Tyrol as they are of the advent market, and in the valleys, there are old paths that lead from chestnut grove to chestnut grove. Tiroler Edle follows this same order and only stocks the variety during the winter half-year instead of keeping it available all year round.
The cream for the filling comes from the Tyrolean Grey cattle, the old breed of cow upon which the entire range of the house is built. Their milk provides the melt that makes the floury chestnut round and supple.
With Earl Grey, with port wine, for a stroll
When held in a warm hand, the cream softens and its earthy tone comes to the fore; when cold, it remains closed.
An Earl Grey contrasts its bergamot with the flouriness, a glass of port wine absorbs the sweetness, and next to gingerbread or vanilla crescents, the bar holds its own without effort. Tuck a piece into your pocket for a winter walk; it breaks cleanly and stands up to the cold. As a dessert next to warm apple compote, the earthy filling gets a fruit to accompany it.
Mildly filled is also the chocolate with Alpine rose honey. Beyond that, more chocolate bars are waiting, and the remaining winter varieties from Tiroler Edle can be found on the same shelf.
