Suzanne Harrington: How to make Dubai chocolate at home — just in time for Easter
Suzanne Harrington: "This isn’t just about a recipe for a supposedly luxury hard-to-find item, or about inducing diabetes in your loved ones – it’s about taking back control, it’s about engaging a DIY ethos in a world gone Dubai chocolate mad." Picture: Andrew Dunsmore.
On a recent stopover in Qatar, the bill for a humble quartet of cucumber maki - it seemed to cost about the same per gram as bluefin tuna – eaten at 2am with my eyes stuck together, blinded by the bling of all the diamond-encrusted abayas on sale in the airport shop opposite, left me too discombobulated to remember two important chocolate-related things.
Firstly, the weekend of chocolate Jesus eggs is almost upon us, and secondly, this would probably be a good place to track down some Dubai chocolate, given how everyone back home is losing their collective minds about the stuff.
But despite Qatar being second next door to Dubai and therefore considerably better stocked with the near-mythical confectionery than my local Lidl, I sleepwalk onto my connecting flight empty-handed. Chocolateless.
Sure enough, the sign outside Lidl hasn’t changed. Dear Customer, it reads, due to unprecedented demand we are still out of Dubai chocolate. The sign is illustrated by a large bar of chocolate filled with a substance the colour of Shrek. I am intrigued.
What’s all the fuss about? Maybe I can get some online. A quick search affirms this – for upwards of fifteen quid a bar. Ketamine on the dark web is probably cheaper.
I keep googling. Turns out Dubai chocolate is a lot easier to synthesise than ketamine.
You can make it at home in twenty minutes – and in the interests of community spirit, I’m going to tell you how.
Start by melting a large bar of dark chocolate and pouring most of it into a chocolate mould.
I don’t have a chocolate mould - I used a rectangular Tupperware container. Put it in the fridge, and make the green substance.
For this, you need pistachios, a large bar of white chocolate (a trip to the wholefood shop if you’re vegan, or the corner shop if you’re not), and the secret ingredient – kataifi pastry, which is the stuff that they use in baklava that looks like hair.
If you don’t live in the kind of place that has the kind of shop that sells kataifi pastry – use shredded wheat. Toast it in the oven until it’s crunchy, then crumble it up.
Blitz a fistful of pistachios in the blender, melt the white chocolate, and mix through the kataifi / shredded wheat and the crumbly pistachio into the white chocolate with a fat pinch of sea salt to offset all the sweetness.
Get your hardened dark chocolate out of the fridge, spoon the pistachio mixture onto it, and pour the remaining dark chocolate on top so that the green stuff is covered.
Set it in the fridge again. In 20 minutes you will have your very own slab of Dubai chocolate, which you can wrap up in gold paper and give to people, like you’re some kind of oligarch.
This isn’t just about a recipe for a supposedly luxury hard-to-find item, or about inducing diabetes in your loved ones – it’s about taking back control, it’s about engaging a DIY ethos in a world gone Dubai chocolate mad.
It’s about presenting your beloveds with outrageously delicious chocolate without having had to go to Dubai for it, or even Lidl. You’re welcome. Happy Easter.
