Matzoh Dubai Chocolate

We finally tried a bar of Dubai chocolate, made in Toronto, purchased from a store in Kensington Market. It was pretty delicious, gooey in the middle. But at $20+ for a 200g bar, it’s a pricey indulgence. The wholesale price of cocoa is 3X to 4X what it was last year, so the price of chocolate is super high right now. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of a matzoh-based Dubai chocolate that my wife brought to my attention.

For Passover, kadayif wouldn’t be allowed, so the food writer Adeena Sussman came up with a caramelized matzo version based on the recipe by Caroline Schiff published in NYT Cooking.

I made a 1.5X batch of the Times recipe, substituting the 4 cups of kataifi, with four boards of matzoh. I mostly ignored the Sussman’s technique, thinking it too fussy. Instead, I prepped my unleavened crackers by drying them out in a toaster oven, breaking them up into small pieces, then sifting out the crumbs. I then fried them up in clarified butter (so they wouldn’t absorb any moisture), thinking that would help them not get soggy. That’s it: no extra salt, no honey drizzle, no caramelizing them in the oven.

I bought some silicone chocolate bar molds from Amazon, but they were a serious disappointment. The material is very thin, so working with them was extremely frustrating. Instead of brushing the shell on with a brush, I used the technique for molding chocolates: ladling a mix of tempered semisweet and milk chocolates to fill the entire cavity then pouring it out. But they were hard to pick up without them flopping everywhere, so trying to invert them or bang them to get rid of bubbles, was fraught with challenges. Worse, there’s some kind of thin ridge on the surface, so it was impossible to scrape the molds clean with a bench scraper or offset spatula.

As for my pistachios, I used a big bag from Costco, the salted kind. It takes a lot of shelling to get the required amount! I also used extra-virgin olive oil in the mix, but found the pronounced flavour to be distracting.

Overall, this was a hit with everyone. Three bars of this size would probably cost $150 or so if bought from a store. I didn’t work out the material costs, but the bulk of the cost is the pistachios, as the chocolate is just a thin shell.

A few things I’d do differently for next time:

• Use a polycarbonate mold: they need to be stiff so they can withstand handling. They also need to be deep enough (at least one inch).
• Don’t use so much salt. The base recipe calls for 2 tsp, and I found the filling way too salty. But others did not, so who knows.
• Try a store-bought pistachio paste. It would be more expensive, but perhaps the tradeoff in flavour is worth it. Costco has two 250g jars of “Early Robin” pistachio paste for $40. You’d need all of that for one batch. Hmm.