A Jar Too Far: Why Nottingham's Bakers Are Better Than Nutella

I want to be careful here, because I like a spoonful of hazelnut spread out of the jar as much as the next person with no self-control. But there's a difference between a guilty pleasure at home and a signature ingredient in something you're charging four quid for. And in Nottingham, right now, the second thing is happening far too often.

Walk into a bakery, order the chocolate hazelnut brownie, the hazelnut cruffin, the nut swirl, whatever it's called this month, and there's a fair chance you're eating the same spread you've got in your cupboard. It's not dishonest. It's just not craft.

The shortcut problem, plainly stated

The trouble with commercial spread isn't that it tastes bad. It's that it tastes like nothing in particular. It's engineered to be smooth, sweet and unchallenging — the hazelnut sits low in the mix, sugar does most of the work, and the whole thing is built to be consistent across millions of jars. Consistency is a virtue in a factory and a liability in a bakery.

Once you've built a brownie around it, you've lost three things at once: the toasty, slightly bitter depth of a roasted nut; the texture that comes from a bit of crunch; and any chance of the bake tasting like it was made by a person. The result is a brownie that could have come from anywhere, in a city where plenty of people are making things that couldn't have come from anywhere else.

What a real hazelnut actually does

Roast a hazelnut, rub off the skins, chop it roughly. That's it. That's the whole trick. Do it and you've got something with a bitter edge that cuts through dark chocolate, a savoury note that keeps a sweet bake from flopping over, and a texture that tells you the baker was in the room.

Go one step further and you get praline — nuts and caramel blitzed while warm, until it turns into a paste you can swirl through a ganache or fold into a filling. It's not difficult. It's just effortful, and effortful is what you're paying for.

Small-batch nut pastes are the middle road, and a legitimate one. Buy a proper paste with a high nut content and you're still getting depth and roast character. The point isn't purity — it's that the nut should be doing the talking.

The bakers already getting it right

This isn't a city-wide write-off. It's the opposite. Some Nottingham bakers are doing precisely what I'm asking for, and they deserve the queue.

The praline work coming out of a couple of Hockley kitchens is genuinely excellent — one bakery in particular does a hazelnut and dark chocolate tart where the praline is made in-house and you can tell from the first bite, because it's slightly grainy in the best way and tastes of actual roasted nuts. Over in Sherwood, there's a spot doing a cobnut and honey bun in autumn that puts most nut-bakes in the city to shame for sheer nut-forwardness. And in some of the smaller Sneinton kitchens, batch-made nut pastes turn up in tarts and slices without anyone making a fuss about it.

None of these places are precious about it. That's what I like. They've simply decided that if you're going to make a hazelnut bake, you should be able to taste hazelnut.

A fair hearing for the jar

Before anyone fires off an email: there are places where the spread earns its keep. A cheap, cheerful, unashamed treat — a little jar-based focaccia thing at a market, a late-night pudding — is not the same as a £4.50 pastry presented as craft baking. Context matters, and a bakery using the spread as one component among several, in a recipe that has other things going on, isn't the same crime as a bake where it's the entire personality.

So the complaint is not about the ingredient existing. It's about the ingredient replacing thought.

The 2026 challenge

Here's what I'd like to see from Nottingham's independents this year: one bake on the counter where the nut is made into something, on site, by hand. A praline. A rough paste. A toasted whole nut folded through a dough. Pick one, put it on the board, and price it honestly.

I'll do my bit too. Every time I find a nut bake that tastes like real nuts rather than a jar, I'll write it up. Every time I find one that doesn't, I'll be gentler about it than I am being here — but I'll still say so.

The spread isn't going anywhere. It's cheap, it behaves, and it never surprises you. But we've got a city full of bakers who can do better than a shortcut, and a customer base that would pay for it. So make the praline. Burn the nuts a little. Put a bit of crunch in the brownie.

We'll notice. And we'll come back.