French Nougat Glacé

My last freezer recipe of the summer isn’t ice cream, but a light and airy Nougat Glacé. If you’ve spent any time in France wandering through pastry shops, you’ve surely stumbled across nougat. Those chewy white candy bars filled with chunks of pistachios, almonds, and candied orange. Or maybe you’ve wandered into a nougat shop, where giant slabs of different flavors fill the display cases, ready to be cut into generous chunks for you to sample.

In my experience, you either love nougat or it’s just not your thing. I tend to waffle back and forth on how much I actually want to eat in a single sitting. But I do find that sweet, chewy candy pretty tasty, especially when it’s a little boozy.

While studying confectionery and ice cream in pastry school, I made both traditional candy nougat and its frozen relative, nougat glacé. Besides being surprisingly simple to pull together without a lot of precision, the frozen version is a little easier on the tooth enamel while still giving you all those familiar nougat flavors. It’s light, creamy, chewy, nutty, and just sweet enough.