Making homemade Dubai chocolate yourself is definitely possible, and it isn’t too hard to do with just a few pieces of equipment and ingredients. The main things you’ll need are pistachio cream, kataifi, chocolate, and a mold for the chocolate. This tutorial will show you how I made some Dubai chocolates with pistachio filling, and let me tell you, they’re rich and delicious.
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What is Dubai chocolate?
The Dubai chocolates started showing up about a year ago, I’d guess, and it’s basically chocolate that has a filling made from pistachio cream and kataifi, which is shredded phyllo dough. The phyllo gives the filling a crunchy texture, and the pistachio cream gives it a sweet and creamy texture.
The combination of flavors and textures is really good, but it’s also REALLY rich, and unless you have a super-high tolerance for sugar, you won’t be eating a lot of this in one sitting. I love chocolate and I can’t eat more than about a quarter of one of these at a time, so they’ll last you for a while!
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Supplies that you’ll need.
Supplies (all links are affiliate links):
- Chocolate mold (I used this silicone one)
- Cookie Sheets
- #70 ice cream scoop
- Parchment paper
- Rubber spatula
- Glass bowl for the microwave
- Fridge or freezer
- Vinyl gloves
Ingredients:
How to make the chocolates.
Prep the pans:
- Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
- Prep the molds, make sure that they’re totally dry.
Make the filling:
- Put the pistachio cream in a mixing bowl
- Add about the same amount of the kataifi.
- Mix the two together until they form a paste-type mixture. Add more kataifi if you need to, it should form a pretty stiff ball.
- Use a #70 scoop to make balls of the filling and put them on a cookie sheet that’s lined with parchment paper. The kataifi will make it difficult to form round balls because it’s stiff, but that’s fine, just scoop out a similar amount each time.
- Freeze the balls for at least ten minutes to stiffen them up.
Melt the chocolate:
- Put the chocolate in the bowl and melt in the microwave using 15-second bursts on high.
- Stir after each burst of heat in the microwave even if it looks like it’s not melted.
- Keep heating and stirring until the chips are almost totally melted, then stir the melted chocolate to finish melting the rest of the chips. Don’t overheat the chocolate by heating it too much, let the residual heat finish the melting.
Fill the molds.
- Use the same #70 scoop to fill the bottoms of the chocolate molds with one scoop per cavity. It will end up being less than a full scoop, but that’s fine.
- Pick the mold up a few inches and drop it onto the counter a few times to knock any bubbles out and to spread the chocolate out evenly in the molds.
- Let the chocolate set up completely. If you want to put it in the fridge for a short time that’s fine but don’t leave it in there for too long or the chocolate can bloom (that’s when it develops the white dusty-looking bloom on the surface. It’s just fat, but it doesn’t look great.)
- Take the filling balls and flatten them in your gloved hand then put them into the mold cavities. Either spread them out completely to the edge of the mold, or leave a space around the edge. They should be lower than the top edge of the molds.
- Remelt the chocolate and scoop more over the top of the cavities to create the top layer of chocolate.
- If you left an outer edge, make sure that the chocolate gets into the sides of the molds. You can use a toothpick to push the chocolate into the sides of the mold if you need to.
De-mold the chocolates:
- Let the chocolate to set up COMPLETELY in the molds. If you try to pull the mold away from the chocolate and you can see it sticking to the edge of the mold, it’s not ready yet. I let them sit at room temperature overnight.
- If you need to put the molds in the fridge for ten minutes that’s okay, but not for much longer than that!
- When the chocolate is totally solid, remove the chocolates from the molds by peeling the silicone ones off the chocolates, or by tapping them out of the hard plastic variety, and putting them on the parchment paper cookie sheet.
- Store at room temperature.
- If you need to refrigerate them because it’s too hot, the chocolates will probably bloom, btu they’ll still be good to eat, they won’t look shiny, though!
Tips for making these chocolates.
Make sure that the molds are dry, because chocolate and water are enemies.
If you want the chocolate to be thinner just add less to the bottom of the molds.
If you don’t want the chocolate on the sides, press the filling all the way to the edge of the molds and add extra filling. Then when you pour the second layer of chocolate the edges won’t fill in with the chocolate. This is going to make it less chocolatey, but the final chocolates are so rich, that might not be a bad thing.
Definitely use gloved hands when you’re adding the filling into the molds, because it’s going to be a huge mess if you don’t. The filling is going to get stickier as it warms up, so if you don’t have gloves, you’ll be washing your hands every two minutes.
If you use hard plastic molds instead of silicone ones, you’ll definitely want to let the chocolate set up for a longer time to make sure that it’s completely set before de-molding. When I made these, I let them sit at room temperature overnight to get really firm.
The silicone mold that I used gave the bottom of the molded chocolates a shiny appearance that was kind of like little dots of water. It wasn’t a bloom, it was shiny, and it has to be because of the texture of the silicone for some reason because the molds were totally dry. I could have rubbed them off with a gloved finger (to avoid fingerprints) but I just left them. I don’t think this would have happened with the hard plastic molds.
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