Posts Categorized: East Brunswick

M. Truffe: now open at 351 Lygon St (in addition to Smith St, Collingwood) It’s a dream come true, Thibault Fregoni aka Monsieur Truffe tells me. It’s the first day his new cafe and chocolate factory (351 Lygon St, near Blythe St, behind a red door but without any signage yet) is open and he is excitedly showing us his new toys. When I say factory I should explain. To date most people in Australia are chocolate melters, including M. Truffe himself. That means they create chocolate by blending and tempering pure chocolate and cocoa butter to make bars and various ganaches. In M. Truffe’s case his chocolate, labelled by percentage of cocoa solids and country of origin, seems to be of higher quality and more elegant than available in other chocoholic venues. What is new is that he will be roasting the actual cocoa beans, starting with the beans from fermented cocoa pods. He’s only just starting out and is experimenting with beans from Tanzania and far North Queensland, which he says are of a higher quality.The big change is that he will be able to label his chocolate from single plntations, much like we are seeing in specialty coffee nowadays. Monsieur Truffe talks chocolate. The big red machine is M.Truffe’s roaster, similar to the sort of roaster used for coffee. He bought it from Tcho, a technology start-up blended with chocolate maker, which has Louis Rossetto, a co-founder of Wired, as chief executive and chief creative. The company, famous for its open source recipes, had to stop roasting in San Francisco when strict environmental protection laws were introduced. I’ve a crush on the melanger The melanger, which was found abandoned in a factory in Paris and cost more to ship back than purchase, crushes the beans and grinds them to a paste. There is a smaller version which he plans to use on nuts to make praline and his own version of Nutella. This, and all the equipment, including varios conches, vacuum flasks and all manner of things, are on open view to the public. The whole M. Truffe story is a brilliant one. Discovered and made popular by bloggers,he started off with a mobile stall on Sundays at Prahran Market in 2005, sharing a commercial kitchen to make his ganache (see what I wrote in The Australian). He then moved onto a permanent stall, eventually establishing his… Read more »