If I weren’t a leavened master, I would surely become a chocolatier!

I was always fascinated by chocolate. Someone said that it is the real food of Gods. After all, who doesn’t like chocolate?! The latest research says that 11 out of 10 people love chocolate. 😉

Unlike the “common” people, however, not only I love to eat it, but also to make it. Maybe, what attracted me the most about the production of chocolate is the same aspect that made me fall in love with the leavening: its complexity.

I am that kind of person who needs the right motivation to get up in the morning, otherwise I don’t even go out of my bed. Fortunately, I was 17 when I slept late for the last time. Then, I discovered the Panettone, tasty, soft, fragrant but also extremely difficult to realize. Since then, the creation of the “perfect” Panettone, has become my greatest challenge, such an obsession that has kept me awake also at night. But, luckily, it is a fruitful obsession.

Unfortunately, today a lot of guys are prey of destructive addiction.

I must admit that I have been very lucky because I found early my “sweet addiction”.

But returning to the similarities between the art of leavening and chocolate, I can state that making a Panettone (or Pandoro) to perfection is not accessible to all. It is the same for chocolate. You cannot look for the recipe on a YouTube video and just expect to make a homemade Panettone which melt in your mouth or chocolate as a maître chocolatier. Instead, few months will not be enough either. Personally, I spent many years before being able to make a Panettone worth being tasted by someone outside of my family.

This is true because there a lot of hidden pitfalls in the realization of both types of product.

For the Panettone the difficulties are referred to the control of the sourdough, the calibration of the moistness and the sugar level in the dough etc, while for the chocolate it is not easy to cope with the correct crystallization, the cooking and cooling time.

For this reason, making my first proposal of chocolate pralines was an exciting and challenging moment.

Since the beginning, I decided that my chocolate pralines had to blend together my big love for leavened and the fascination that chocolate has always exerted on me.

So it was that the inspiration came to me during one of my trips abroad. I was in a Belgian pastry, when I was tasting some chocolate pralines filled with marzipan, their typical sweet the pastry chef told me. The chocolate coating was simply sublime! Crunchy, not overly sweet, with a perfect melting texture. But, in my opinion, the marzipan filling did not do justice to it.

So, I had an idea: to replace the marzipan filling with the dough of my Panettone.

I came back Italy and I immediately got to work for days on end to realize the new pralines. After few days, some samples were ready to be subjected to the taste testing of the critics. Now, I had only to understand who those critics were. I was on the doorstep of my laboratory, thinking about it, when I saw sone kids playing on the other side of the street. So, I thought that there is nothing more beautiful than the candour and the sincerity of kids. They never lie. And these kids were just the first “testers” of my pralines.

I looked at them with a lot of curiosity and fun while they were tasting my pralines and, from their face and the speed at which they devour them, I realized that those pralines could have a future.

The litmus test was the exhibition in the bakery of Potenza, Tiri Bakery & Caffè. I was enthusiastic when my collaborators told me that the weekly production of praline was scarfed down in a day. Clients told us that pralines create addiction.

Someone even told me: “Master, if you try one, you want to eat the whole box. One pops, one just can’t stop, as it is said”.

So, I decided to call them “Tirivoglie”, the pralines with the leavened heart.