KO EN French Dessert⏱ 95 minEdit history

Nougat (Honey and Egg-White Confection with Almonds)

Name: Nougat (Honey and Egg-White Confection with Almonds)
Prep time: 35 min
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 1 h 35 min
Yield: 20 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 250 g honey; 350 g caster sugar; 100 ml water; 100 g glucose syrup; 70 g egg whites; 1 pinch salt; 250 g whole almonds; 100 g pistachios; 2 sheets edible wafer paper

The honey-and-egg-white confection of southern France. Every other sugar recipe on this site boils a syrup to a target and then does something with it: coats fruit, casts a sheet, stirs it into starch, pours it into whites and stops. Nougat goes on cooking after the pouring. The aerated mass is beaten for another twenty to thirty minutes to drive water out of it, and doneness is judged by dropping a sample into cold water rather than by a clock. Where you stop is the recipe: 135°C gives soft nougat, 145-150°C gives the hard kind.

Ingredients

20servings

The syrup (one 20x20cm slab)
honey · lavender honey is the classic; its aroma survives250 g
caster sugar350 g
water100 ml
glucose syrup · keeps crystals from forming100 g
The foam
egg whites · 2 large, at room temperature70 g
salt1 pinch
The nuts, which must be warm
whole almonds · skin on, toasted250 g
pistachios · shelled100 g
To enclose it
edible wafer paper · 20x20cm; baking parchment if you have none2 sheets

Steps

Toast the almonds and pistachios at 150°C for 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 60°C and leave them in it. They have to go in warm: 350g of cold nuts dropped into a mass at 130°C pulls it below working temperature and it seizes before you can spread it.
⏲ 10 min
Line the tin with one sheet of wafer paper. Do it now — once the nougat is ready you will not have a spare hand.
⏲ 2 min
Bring the honey to 121°C in a small pan. Honey boils up hard, so use a pan with room in it.
⏲ 8 min
At the same time boil the sugar, water and glucose to 145-150°C without stirring. Judge it by temperature, not colour, as what sugar does says. Why not to stir is explained on lokum: a spoon drags crystals off the pan wall into the syrup, where they seed.
⏲ 10 min
Whip the whites with the salt to just short of stiff. Any trace of fat in the bowl and they will not rise at all (cooking eggs).
⏲ 5 min
With the whisk still running, pour in the honey first and then the sugar syrup, both in a thin stream. All at once and the egg protein cooks where it lands and goes grainy — the same technique as the Italian meringue on macaron, only far hotter.
⏲ 5 min
This is the whole confection. Keep the bowl over a bain-marie or the lowest possible heat and keep beating for 20 to 30 minutes. You are driving water out of something that is already a foam, and it gets steadily heavier and starts hanging off the beater.
⏲ 30 min
Test it by dropping a little into cold water. If the set drop softens under your finger it is not there yet; if it snaps cleanly you have hard nougat. For soft nougat, stop one stage earlier.
⏲ 3 min
Off the heat, add all the warm nuts at once and fold them through in under thirty seconds, by which point it is stiff enough to hurt. Linger and it will not spread.
⏲ 2 min
Tip it into the tin, lay the second wafer sheet on top and press it flat with a rolling pin or a board. Leave something heavy on it.
⏲ 10 min
Leave it overnight at room temperature and cut it next day with a serrated knife. Not in the fridge — the sugar pulls moisture out of the air and the surface goes wet.
⏲ 10 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Soft nougat and hard nougat differ by temperature, not by ingredients. Stop at 135°C for the chewy nougat tendre; carry on to 145-150°C for nougat dur, which snaps. Both kinds on sale in Montélimar come out of the same pan.
Turrón: the same confection in Jijona and Alicante. ko.wikipedia's own entry names turrón alongside it as "similar". Italian torrone and Greek mandolato are the same family.
Nougat de Montélimar: to use that name in France the convention is at least 30% almonds (or 28% almonds plus 2% pistachios) and at least 25% honey. Cut the nuts and it becomes a different sweet.
Nougat noir: no egg white at all — honey and sugar taken to caramel, then almonds folded in. With no foam in it, it is brown and much harder. Provence's thirteen desserts include both the white and the black.
Dried fruit: candied cherries, orange peel. Anything with moisture in it shortens the keeping.
It is an Arab sweet by descent. ko.wikipedia describes it as an Arab-style confection that came about from the influence the Arabs brought through North Africa into Iberia and southern France in the eighth century. The name and the present form are southern French; the lineage is not.

Tips

The point of this confection is that it keeps cooking after it is a foam. Every other sugar recipe here boils a syrup to a target and then does something with it: tanghulu drives it to 155°C and sets it as glass, Dobos torte casts it as a sheet and scores it before it sets, lokum stops at 118°C and stirs it into starch, and macaron's Italian meringue pours 118°C syrup into whites and stops there. Nougat pours and then goes on for another twenty to thirty minutes.
Which means the doneness of a foam gets measured on the sugar ladder. You judge it by dropping a sample into cold water, not by a clock — the stages in what sugar does applied to an aerated mass rather than to a syrup.
What holds it together is only the absence of water. This site sets things a good many ways: gelatine (panna cotta), collagen (pyeonyuk), starch (dotori-muk), agar (yōkan), egg and heat (cheesecake), acid (key lime pie). Nougat has none of them. It sets because there is almost no water left, which is exactly why the temperature is the firmness.
The glucose and the honey are what stop it going grainy. A syrup at this concentration will crystallise given the chance, and lokum explains the mechanism: a mixture of differently shaped sugars cannot pack into a lattice. Honey is itself an invert sugar, so it does two jobs here.
Warm nuts. This is where a home nougat most often fails. 350g is not a small quantity, and cold it takes that much heat straight out of the mass.
The wafer paper is packaging, not decoration. At this sugar concentration the surface pulls moisture out of the air and sticks to whatever it meets — the "moisture retention" that what sugar does lists among sugar's jobs, seen from the outside. Lokum answers the same problem with a starch dusting; nougat wraps itself in paper you can eat.
Airtight, at room temperature. The fridge is the worst place for it. Once the surface has taken up moisture it stays tacky and does not dry back.
It is not pavlova. That dries a foam too, but in low oven air, holding a fixed shape for hours. Nougat is dried while being beaten — the aerating and the drying happen at once.