Nutchos

My mom isn't s huge fan of chocolates and candy in general, but she loves Nutchos and she always made you forfeit a couple Coffee Crisp at Halloween. Coffee Crisp are still available, but Nutchos have been discontinued by Nestle, so I thought I'd try to make some for her birthday.

A quick Google search for "Nutchos recipe" turns up a plethora of results and most of them reference the Best of Bridge. So I read through several of the options and this is the recipe I used.

2 - 10 oz (300 g) of semi-sweet chocolate

1 - 10 oz (300 g) of peanut butter chips

7 oz (200 g) of roughly crushed ripple chips

2 cups peanuts

Melt the chocolate chips and peanut butter chips in a double boiler. Stir in peanuts and crushed potato chips. Drop on wax paper, allow to cool. Store in the refrigerator or freezer. Makes 48. 

Super easy, right? The only challenging part was figuring out what "roughly crushed" actually meant. I crushed them so they were the size of the crumbs that you get at the bottom of a normal bag of chips, and I think next time I'd go just a little smaller as I thought some of the pieces were still a little big. (Does that mean they'll be "medium-ly crushed"?)

When you're making this, be sure you use a big enough bowl. The chocolate and peanut butter chips together is about 5 cups before melting and the crushed chips were 4 cups, plus the 2 cups of peanuts. The glass bowl I used is 2.5L and it was big enough, but just barely.

Since I don't actually own a double boiler, I just used that glass bowl over a pot of boiling water. A couple things to be aware of when doing it this way - you don't want the water in the pot to be high enough to touch the bottom of the bowl (since the purpose of a double boiler is to use the heat of the steam to slowly melt the chocolate) and to just be mindful of where the steam is coming out between the pot and the bowl so that you don't burn yourself.

I just kept stirring the chocolate and taking pictures of the process.

It took maybe 10 minutes to get it completely melted. Toss in the chips and the peanuts. You can see here why I said the bowl was barely big enough. I had some stuff jumping out of the bowl when I was stirring the peanuts and chips in.

Drop this on wax paper so they cool. There seems to be a bit of melted chocolate that was pooling a bit at the bottom of the bowl, so I just had to be sure to keep mixing it up again as I was going. I actually got 62 chocolates from the recipe, not just 48, and I thought I still had a pretty good size chocolate. They'd all have to be 30% larger if you tried to make only 48.

Make sure you have lots of space as this pretty much took up my entire work space. Admittedly, my kitchen doesn't really have a good counter space for working. "Must have been designed by a man" my Grandma O said when she came to see my house after I moved in.

These do tend to be quite soft, so you'll want to store them in the fridge or freezer until ready to use. They don't fall apart or anything, they'll just melt on your fingers and face quite easily, as evidenced by my niece.
:-)

~Lisa