Terra Prima: the truffle that began with a request

For a long time, the same question kept coming back to the atelier: “What about people who can’t have lactose?” It came from clients, from friends, from guests who tasted a bonbon at an event and had to politely hand it back. The one who asked most insistently was a couple, friends of the maison: devoted to truffles, and with a lactose intolerance that made them, until now, a forbidden pleasure.

Terra Prima is the answer.

The truffle, in its purest form

The chocolate truffle borrowed its name. The Romans called the rare fungus that grows underground terrae tuber, “tuber of the earth”, and the chocolate version mimics its look: small, irregular, dusted in cocoa as if just lifted from the soil. (The difference between a truffle, a bonbon and a praline is explained in this guide.)

The starting point was to go back to essentials. Four ingredients, nothing more: dark chocolate, lactose-free cream, cocoa butter and cocoa. The ganache is rolled and coated in cocoa by hand, one by one. Rustic outside, silken within.

Thought through before it was made

In a truffle, the cream is no detail. It is half the ganache, and it is what gives that melt-in-the-mouth texture. Lactose-free cream behaves differently: the milk sugar has already been split into two simpler sugars that taste sweeter, and with so few ingredients everything shows.

The Chef knew that before she started. The recipe was worked out in her head, ratio by ratio, and the very first batch came out as it should. Someone who knows chocolate doesn’t need many attempts; she needs a good reason to begin, and this one had a face. The chocolate comes from Ecuador, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and it is what gives the truffle its character.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

Terra Prima is suitable for people with lactose intolerance. It is not suitable for people with a milk protein allergy: lactose-free cream is still cream, and every piece is made in an atelier that also handles other ingredients, milk included. Intolerance and allergy are not the same thing. If in doubt, talk to us before ordering.

Each coffret holds sixteen truffles (187 g). It is fresh chocolate: enjoy it within five days.

A box that leaves no one out

At almost every Christmas table there is someone who watches the box of chocolates go by. This year it doesn’t have to be that way. Christmas orders close on 11 December, with delivery across mainland Portugal.

To the couple who kept asking: thank you. This one is for you.