Torrone Minetto Quality of craftsmanship

The story of Torrone Minetto has an unusual beginning; it traces back to an animal, a mammal to be precise: a pig.

In the early 1980s, in fact, from Piana Crixia, in the province of Savona, over the hill from Mr. Carlo's house, a family friend arrives to kill the pig and make salami from it.

He arrives late, however, around 9 a.m., since he was making nougat for the annual and historic festival held right in Piana Crixia.

Carlo, who has always been curious about the methods put in place to produce this sweet, seizes the opportunity and then requests the recipe to finally attempt to reproduce it.

His friend, however, aware of the initial difficulty and the length of the procedures, offers to help him along with other acquaintances the next day. And so it goes.

From that day on, Carlo, once a year, does his best to make it and over time refines the technique.

If at the beginning it was a product generated very artisanally, on the stove in a bain-marie, and it was consumed within the family and made to taste to friends, for Carlo it then takes on more and more relevance so much so that he builds himself a first baking machine to minimize cooking time.

To make nougat in fact, it is necessary to cook the beaten egg whites and honey, continuing to stir and mix the mixture for hours, causing it to harden.

The baker then comes to the rescue: a vessel in which a rotating paddle stirs the mixture in a bain-marie, so that the cake cooks but never comes into excessive contact with the flame. The consequence would otherwise be a darker coloring of the nougat.

It is the dawn of the year 2000 and Mr. Minetto decides to renovate his house also in function of this sweet, which by now pleasantly clutters an important place in his occupations and needs, in return, also a counterpart in physical space.

Thus, the workshop of the famous Minetto nougat was officially born.

The fruit of this work pleases, satisfies the creator and customers. Mr. Carlo designs and has assembled a new cooker of adequate size that allows the preparation of 40 kilograms of compound per day. A choice that results in great savings since it is a very expensive piece of machinery.

The equipment is still in use now, after 22 years, a symptom of how well it was conceived.

The success of the dedication, the desire of and in making, is sanctioned and sealed by the arrival of Minetto nougat in Via Montenapoleone in Milan, in several countries in Europe and in Canada. Without any fair, by means of word of mouth alone.

Coming to the present day, Mr. Carlo at the end of 2019 begins to mature the intention to close the business. Not because of a decrease in turnover, but because for him, who has now completed a large number of doughs, the work begins to be too demanding.

This is how his daughter comes in, who prevents the sale of the baker, the symbolic object of this journey, and in time of pandemic takes the reins and the baton of her father's work and a part of the kernels in free usufruct.