CioccolaTO

I've mentioned before how much I love Turin and how famous they are for their chocolate (even if you've never heard of it). If you weren't convinced that it should be on your Northern Italy travel adventure, perhaps this will do the trick. Every year, usually at the end of February, the city of Turin sponsors the CioccolaTO - a gigantic chocolate festival.



Held in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto (seen above), tents are set up to display the makings of chocolatiers from all over Italy and Europe. Vendors ply passersby with freebies, tempting you to stop and eventually purchase some of their goods. I took an afternoon off work and headed out to Turin with a friend visiting from Zimbabwe (she needed the break) to explore this foodie haven.


It didn't take much to get me to stop immediately. The first stand we saw was for hot chocolate. Options abound. You can get your cocoa flavored with mint, liquor, dark chocolate, milk chocolate and about six others that I don't even remember. I opted for canella, or cinnamon. This is no Starbucks where they add your high-fructose cinnamon-flavored corn syrup into your cocoa. No, these hot cocoas are blended together from fresh ingredients - the stand had separate containers for each different type of cocoa. As you can see, the drink had more of a "thick pudding" aspect than your typical watered down Nesquik.


The first few booths we encountered seemed to be run by small producers (one of the later ones was heavy hitter, Swiss Lindt). They didn't spend as much on fancy wrappings but what they did, they did well. Fruits and spices were candied and covered in dark chocolate (orange and ginger above) but there were multiple options in the way of normal chocolate bars. I walked away with some of my favorites like chocolate orange, rose chocolate, and chocolate with fleur de sel. Some dark chocolate may have also made its way into my bag, to be saved for making my dark chocolate cherry chunk cookies for the next bake sale/fundraiser.


I saw some uses for chocolate that I'd never previously imagined. Yes, that is actually chocolate pasta (light and dark) pictured above. When I asked the clerk what one cooks with chocolate pasta, I got a "whatever you want" as the answer. While I didn't buy any, I guess I'd imagine a light sauce with fresh nuts and cream or folding them into a sweet dessert casserole or a "chocolate spaghetti with candied fruit 'meat'balls". Hm, maybe I should've bought it to experiment with!


But the CioccolaTO is more than just buying and tasting chocolates. it has to be - even with my sweet tooth I could only take two small pieces after the hot cocoa. The festival puts on laboratories, demonstrations, and even cooking classes available (some in English) to the general public. The above demonstration got going after we left but it appeared as though he chef was going to do something very interesting with all those little cups. We even stumbled across a local group of Italian elementary school students participating in a learning session under another tent. The production and history of local, regional, and national foods are a serious matter in Italy.

Though the chocolate festival was not our only foodie destination in Torino, we left with full bellies, chocolate hangovers, and heavy shopping bags. Since the festival closed just a few days after we visited, we were lucky to have caught it at all and even luckier to have experienced such a wide range of Italian chocolates with so little effort!