The Complete Guide to Nougat: Varieties, Ingredients, Storage, and Home Baking
The gap between a traditional European nougat block and the center of a mainstream American chocolate bar comes down to mass manufacturing practicalities. In modern snack manufacturing, true honey-egg foams are difficult to scale. Honey varies in acidity and water content from season to season, while egg whites are expensive, heat-sensitive, and prone to salmonella concerns in non-pasteurized setups.
These candy bar filling differences reshaped global terminology throughout the 20th century. High-volume factories replaced honey and cane sugar with high-fructose corn syrup, refined sucrose, and malt extract. Instead of fresh egg whites, food scientists adopted hydrolyzed vegetable proteins or soy albumen, blended with palm oil to lower chew resistance. The resulting filling can be extruded across continuous assembly lines at thousands of units per minute. It fulfills the broad definition of an aerated sugar paste, but it lacks the floral complexity, structural resilience, and roasted nut density of genuine nougat.
