Anonymous Wanderers

For the sake of Pralines

Let's get it straight! Pralines are almonds coated in red sugar. The normal crystallised sugar is mixed with red food colouring before the beginning of the cooking, and it is cooked between soft ball and caramel.

Screenshot 2026-03-27 at 1

The precise cooking of the sugar is super important as Pralines are used in "Brioches aux pralines", and if the sugar is caramelised it will never melt while the brioche is baked. The result will be a failure, equal to all the failures of all the baker-apprentices that have worked at mastering sugar cooking and brioche baking for centuries. The result has no name. No brownie points for messing up.

When I fail to spot the soft ball state of the sugar and end up with caramelised almonds, I keep them in a jar, and offer them my friends. It makes everybody happy.

Screenshot 2026-03-27 at 1

When the result is perfect, the red sugar of the pralines will melt again while the brioche is baked, and will infuse in the dough around, and build short smudges and streaks of red sugar in the dough. Just imagine tearing in the brioche, or cutting thick and smooth slices with a good knife. If you can't, just find a proper bakery, and try it.

IMG_0473

Now, I recently found several turd posts on the web whose authors assert that "pralines" and "pralinés" is the same thing. Let's make it quick: this is bollox.

When something is "Praliné", that means that there are bits of almonds coated in sugar in what you eat. For example the exquisite chocolates of master chocolate makers, that are called "pralines" in English or German, and "chocolats pralinés" in French. Obviously there are other kinds of "chocolates" beside the "pralinés". One just needs to visit the shop of a master chocolatier, in order to discover chocolates that cannot be found in the shiny plastic blisters of the supermarkets.

That is where supermarket-culture and un-brained Assistive Incompetence (AI) meet in a chorus of self validation and confirmation biases. Consider for a minute, these mono-language native English speakers who make fun of the people who can't seem to be able to pronounce "sheet" and "shit" in a different way. I agree that's appalling to come out of the secondary cycle of any European school and being unwilling to make that effort that will create the possibility to engage with other people of the planet.

But let's be fair. Being multi-language disabled doesn't justify the absence of a tiny bit of logic in the brain, that would allow to realise that "é" i.e. "e" with an acute accent is an endogenous typographic sign of the French language, and as such it makes a difference when the accent is there or not. For example, someone who is floué is a man who got swindled, and someone who is floue is a woman whose traits of character cannot be the described. Clearly different.

For those people who are "flous", I surmise it is easy to be "floués" by illiterate people and similarly illiterate Assistive Incompetence who can not make the difference between their "sheet" and their "shit", or the equivalent mistake in any other language.

Get off the Assisted Incompetence junk. Define yourself.
Get on the pralines, and if you fail make your friends happy!