With our new dairy free and vegan Hazelnut Truffles launching into Waitrose very soon we wanted to briefly talk about them.
When Moo Free was starting out in 2010, one of our earliest products was a box of pralines. They were very popular and made an excellent gift for birthdays, Valentine’s day and Christmas. We made these by hand, using a 28-cavity mould, we would fill each cavity with chocolate, tip the mould upside down so that the chocolate would fall out again but left each cavity lined with the chocolate. The moulds were put in a walk-in fridge for the chocolate to set. Once set we would fill each cavity with a praline mix using a machine operated by hand that filled 7 cavities at a time.
Chocolate was put on top of the praline mix and put in the fridge again to set. As you can imagine it took a long time to make a few boxes. We made the praline mix by hand by grinding hazelnuts, sugar and a small amount of oil together. We started this process using a Vitamix blender, which made 500g at a time. We went on to purchase a Robot Coupe that did 4kg at a time. Eventually the praline filler machine broke, and we could not afford to replace it at the time, so we discontinued them.
Fast forward a few years and we have now invested in a one-shot machine. A one-shot machine pumps the chocolate and filling into each cavity at the same time. The machine will fill a mould with 28 cavities all at the same time. They automatically feed into a cooling tunnel and come out the other end set and ready to go into boxes. A process that is much quicker.
We have since discovered that we are not allowed to call these chocolates pralines, because to be a praline they must be covered in chocolate. We are not allowed to call our chocolate, chocolate because it contains rice powder. But that is a whole new blog!
Our new Hazelnut Truffles are free from dairy free, gluten free and soya free. They are also vegan and vegetarian. As they are produced on a whole new machine this means they are separate from our bar line
