Chocolate and Nutella Fudge with Salt -YUM

I am a huge fan of the sitcom "Modern Family" and in one of the more recent episodes Manny and Gloria were talking about adding a sprinkle of salt to chocolate milk.  They said the salt brought out the flavor so much better.  At the time I just kind of laughed it off but then I started to see chocolate and salt treats everywhere!  Now I am not sure if I just wasn't paying attention before, or if this is a new thing.  Regardless, I was curious to try out the combo.  Then, like it was meant to be, I recently (as in days ago) found the blog The Small Boston Kitchen and just one day after starting to follow it, she featured this chocolate and nutella fudge that is topped off with salt!  Being a huge nutella fan I thought this would be the perfect test.

This basic fudge recipe is from Giada De Laurentiis...

The Necessities:

Butter, for greasing pan
1 (14 oz. ) can sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
8 oz. high-quality bittersweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips
1 cup Nutella, room temperature
3 tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
Sea salt, approximately 1/2 tsp

The Ingredients

The first step was to butter an 8 x 8 inch pan and then line it with parchment paper so that there are 2 inches hanging off the sides.

Lined Pan

So this was not the best lining job.  I think there will be more than a few wrinkles in the final product, but oh well!  Once that was all done, I set it aside for later.

Next I got out a pot to boil some water to create a double boiler.  Then I got a glass bowl, which happened to be bigger than necessary, but I needed to use the glass bowl because my melamine bowls would have probably been disastrous as a double boiler.

I combined the condensed milk, vanilla, chocolate chips, nutella, and butter in the glass bowl.

All the components....

One note about the vanilla...

Mexican vanilla

When I was coming back from Cancun last year, everybody and their brother seemed be grabbing the vanilla by the arm-load and taking it home with them.  So I decided I probably should jump on this bandwagon - that and I needed to get Nick a gift!  When I finally opened it, I was truly shocked by how amazing it smelled, and the flavor is outrageous.  I wished I had grabbed a couple liters of it!  Now, whenever I hear that people are going through Mexico I tell them to make sure they get some and ask them to pick me up another bottle!

Back to the fudge...

Once the water was boiling in the pot I placed the glass bowl so that it was sitting in the pot.  However, the water should NOT touch the bottom of the bowl. 

Doubling boiling away

So I stirred this together until all the chocolate chips had melted.

All melted together...

The melted result had an odd consistency, it seemed a bit like putty, it all stuck together, but it tasted great!  At that point I poured it into the prepared bowl.  It slid out pretty well - not much scraping was needed.

Ready for the fridge

Once it was in the dish, I flattened out the top and then sprinkled salt over the mixture.  While the recipe called for sea salt, I only had kosher salt so I just used that.  Then I put it in the fridge for over 2 hours to let it cool before cutting.

The results were delicious....

The yummy results!

The nutella smooths out the sweet chocolate, and the salt was such a great addition and contrast to the fudge.  These were not at all too dense like some fudge pieces can be.  These had a nice consistency.  It really is hard to eat just one piece!!

Such a great flavor and so easy to make.  I am amazed because my only other fudge experiment was ages ago using the recipe on the back of the Fluff container!  This was much less messy and way more delicious.  Definitely a great treat to make when you have guests coming on short notice or to put out at a party.