Everyone knows the term and everyone has tried one. But what exactly are pralines?

Today the whole world celebrates Fairy Day. The USA is now content with pralines and UFOs. These would not have been my two wishes with the good fairy, but you can hardly say "no" to chocolate and pralines.  

Everyone knows the term. Everyone has tried one. But what exactly are pralines? If you simply ask someone on the street, you will surely get answers like "small", "bite-sized", "chocolaty" and "with alcohol". But by definition it looks like this:

A praline is described as a bite-sized product made of chocolate in which the chocolate content is at least 25 percent. The filling of a praline largely determines its taste. Such a filling can consist of ganache, nougat, nuts, pistachios, liqueurs, marzipan or fruit.

If a chocolate product has less than 25 percent chocolate or couverture, it is called a "confectionery". 

Likewise, no grain products may be present in the chocolate. This means no biscuits, waffles or crispy biscuits. Therefore, Duplo is probably not the longest praline in the world.

As just mentioned, there is a wide variety of pralines. They are distinguished either according to their production or their filling.

After production, a distinction is made between truffle pralines, cut pralines, molded pralines and free-formed pralines. The truffle praline describes the mostly spherical hollow chocolate body filled with the desired filling. According to its name, the Chocolate candy is cut out of a plate and therefore has a rather angular rectangular shape.  

Formed pralines are these small artistic masterpieces, where you can hardly get out of amazement. With some of them you can even doubt whether they are really still made of chocolate. For the beginners and minimalists in the world of chocolate, the last category is the most beautiful to live out. Here there is simply no emphasis on form, so that even the almond slivers now find a home.

If you now differentiate them according to the ingredients, you get the marzipan, nougat, caramel, ganache and liqueur chocolates. As the names already speak for themselves, no further explanation follows here.

Of course, you can also distinguish between the pralines by the chocolate. Here you can distinguish between dark, bitter, plain, milk and white chocolate. Depending on the chocolate used, the praline as a whole, tastes different.

The probably best-known pralines by name are the Halloren Balls, whose origin lies in Halle, i.e. in Germany, the Mozart ball, which have their origin in Austria, and the seafood shape pralines, which has nothing to do with real seafood and comes from Belgium.

Chocolates are mostly found in chocolate shops, confectioners (for example here in Fulda) and bakers or in the supermarket. Here, the quality varies enormously, both in the processing and in the basic ingredients used. 

The praline was invented by a German Chef for his French master. The so-called Belgian pralines were then first produced in 1912 by Jean Neuhaus II.  

By the way, the world's most expensive praline is worth $240,000 - so it's practically a bargain.