This might be the hardest flavor for our customers to pronounce—we even spell it out phonetically: jon-doo-yuh! Despite that, it’s still one of our most popular flavors.
Gianduja is a confectionary product from the town of Turin in Piedmont, Italy, invented during Napoleon’s regency. It’s a pairing of hazelnuts and chocolate, a beloved combination all over the world, but nowhere as much as in Italy where the flavor was born as a way to stretch the chocolate a bit further by combining it with hazelnuts. The name gianduja is derived from the name of one of the characters of the commedia dell’arte, who wears the mask of an honest peasant from the Piedmontese countryside, a bon vivant with a certain inclination for wine, food, and beautiful girls.
Gianduja, the ingredient (not the character), was, essentially, Nutella before there ever was Nutella—a high-quality version of it, so to speak. We love not only the flavor but also the story behind it, the historical significance of gianduja and its role in Italian folklore.
To make our gianduja ice cream, we use a mix of pure hazelnut pastes from Sicily and Piedmont, combining different terroir flavors. The hazelnuts from Sicily, grown on volcanic soil, are smokier, with a higher mineral taste, while the hazelnuts from Piedmont are sweeter and milder. Together, they create a more complex and balanced taste than each cultivar on its own. (And the factory in Piedmont that processes our hazelnuts actually uses the nutshells to create energy to run the factory—something we absolutely love!)
We combine this hazelnut paste with our Michel Cluizel 99% Infini Noir dark chocolate for a rich, smooth, unparalleled flavor. In our mind, it redefines hazelnut chocolate and elevates it to a whole new level.