Our Favorite Hazelnut Cocoa Spread Is The Gold Standard

It was 1998 when I first traveled to Europe. Over the course of three weeks, my school group and I visited five countries, including Italy. I remember sitting down to a continental breakfast the morning after we arrived in Rome. There was coffee, bread, little crunchy toasts, butter, jam, and something called Nutella, which I'd never seen or heard of before. I spread it on my bread and my palate changed forever. Why had chocolate hazelnut spread never been in my life before? Shortly after, Nutella became extraordinarily popular in the United States. Many companies began making their own brands of sweet, nutty, chocolatey goodness. We, of course, wanted to see how some of them compared to each other, so one of our tasters set out on a blind taste test of four hazelnut cocoa spreads. It's no surprise that the original Nutella set the standard as the best.

Early American advertisements for the spread suggested it was a nutritious option for breakfast, but Nutella is nowhere near being a healthy food. Sure, there's hazelnuts and cocoa in it, but there's also a high amount of sugar and palm oil. Still, it's a satisfyingly creamy, rich, sweet treat that can be spread on toast, pancakes, and pastries or eaten right out of the jar. Other brands our taste tester tried proved too oily and not as balanced in flavor. The Italian-born Nutella is divisive, but in the world of chocolate nut spreads, it still reigns supreme.

As much as I fell in love with Nutella all those years ago in Italy, I refrain from buying it here in the United States. The reason behind this is simple: I'll eat the entire jar with a spoon so I'd rather keep the temptation far away. It turns out, most of the Nutella you find on American grocery store shelves is made in Canada or Mexico; not imported from Italy. Many Nutella aficionados claim the stuff from Europe tastes better, claiming it's richer and has more hazelnut flavor.

The Nutella our taste tester purchased was the American version, but it still ranked the best among its competitors. We can only imagine the Italian version would have knocked the socks off the rest of the group — including, perhaps, American Nutella. Some specialty stores in the United States sell authentic Italian Nutella. If you want to try it, it'll come in a glass jar (as opposed to the American version, which comes in plastic) with the label written in Italian. Italian Nutella boasts a composition of 13% hazelnuts and 5% milk, whereas American jars don't give these details at all.