Secrets of viral Dubai Chocolate revealed from how Brit mum created treat in kitchen to celeb fans & bars selling out
HAVE you heard of Dubai Chocolate?
Unless you’ve cut off your internet recently, the answer is probably yes.
But have you tried Dubai Chocolate?
Given how popular and how hard it is to get hold of, the answer may well be no.
Dubai Chocolate might just be one of the most bonkers food crazes the UK has ever seen.
They are gooey, crunchy bars bursting with a filling of pistachio cream and knafeh — a traditional Arab dessert.
And, despite coming it at around 525 calories per 100g, they’ve made us lose our heads a bit, with a little help from TikTok.
The original Dubai bar cost around £16 and supermarkets have had to impose limits on how many one person can buy, while someone on eBay is selling five bars for more than £200.
Even Brooklyn Beckham has chipped in with a video tutorial on how to make the stuff at home.
But its origins are more humble than you might think.
This is not the creation of some master chocolatier designed to satisfy the cravings of an oil-rich sultan.
In fact, just four years ago, its creator had never made a chocolate bar in her life.
Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian technical services engineer based in Dubai was halfway through her second pregnancy when she started to get cravings for the knafeh her mother used to make.
She then started dreaming about what it would be like to have a chocolate bar filled with the dessert.
So Sarah started experimenting in her kitchen.
She enlisted the help of Nouel Catis Omamalin, a top Paris-trained pastry chef working in Dubai, and together they trialled versions until they had exactly what they wanted — and the Dubai chocolate the world would soon go crazy for was born.
The bar named Can’t Get Knafeh Of It launched in 2022 and things started slowly until they sent samples to Dubai-based social media influencers.
Viewers on TikTok were transfixed by videos of people tucking into the stuff, slowly breaking away pieces to reveal the creamy mixture within.
Sarah and Nouel, who were still making the bars by hand, began being flooded with orders to the point where they had to cap sales at 500 bars a day.
Now, Fix, their company, has more than 380,000 followers on TikTok and more than 1.5million likes across their posts.
The #DubaiChocolate hashtag has more than 330,000 videos under it on the app while hundreds of influencers have gone viral giving a review.
Plenty of celebs have got their hands on it too.
Millie Bobby Brown and her husband Jake Bongiovi tasted it at the beginning of this year.
‘QUEUED FOR HOURS’
Jake said: “I’m taking this home with me.
“In fact I’m taking all five of these home with me. And I’m going to eat them all tonight.”
Even Richard Madeley managed an “It’s all right” when he had a bite of the chocolate on Good Morning Britain last week.
So sought-after was the bar that global fans were begging people heading to Dubai to bring back a sample.
Others, such as Brooklyn Beckham, took to social media to show off how you can make it yourself.
For a long time it could only be found for sale on TikTok or local corner shops, normally for prices upwards of £15.
But now the UK supermarket chains are getting in on the viral trend — just in time for Easter.
Lidl released its version of the bar, which comes in at just under a fiver, on TikTok shop.
Just 72 minutes after being released, it had sold out.
The budget retailer had shifted 6,000 of the bars — that’s over EIGHTY bars being sold every minute.
And on Saturday, Lidl’s bar hit the real shelves, with dozens spotted queuing outside before making a mad dash to the middle aisle.
Master Swiss chocolatiers at Lindt have also brought out their take — with bars here priced at a Dubai-worthy £10.
But it was clear from the start Lindt’s bar was going to be a hit.
It had huge success when the company first brought it out in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and the United States.
Last November, hundreds of shoppers queued for hours in the rain with camping chairs and in their waterproofs to get their hands on the Lindt bar from the store in the western German city of Aachen.
Some dedicated fans even claimed they’d travelled more than 4,000 miles to give it a try.
This was all despite the fact that only a hundred of the bars were on offer.
And when Lindt’s version hit the shelves here in Waitrose, it proved so popular the supermarket had to impose a two-bar limit per customer.
It wasn’t long before people were reselling it online for hundreds of pounds.
So are you tempted to try it yourself?
BROOKLYN’S RECIPE IS EASY E-KNAFEH
WANT to follow Brooklyn’s recipe at home? Here’s how.
Start off by filling a frying pan with knafeh filo dough.
Ensure that it is the dried and shredded variety you are using (available on Amazon and in world food aisles).
Melt in three knobs of butter, until all mixed together.
Keep toasting it in the frying pan until golden brown.
Empty it out into a bowl, then stir in three generous dollops of pistachio cream. Put the mixture aside.
Now, melt some white chocolate, until smooth.
Prepare your baking tin or mould, using the deepest one you can find.
Pour a very shallow criss-cross pattern of the white chocolate on the bottom of it.
You can add some drops of food colouring for colour.
Only a splatter is needed here – this is for the decoration.
Allow this to set.
Now, melt together some milk chocolate chunks until it’s smooth, consistent, and pourable.
Add this melted chocolate to the bottom of the mould, but don’t fill it – just a layer along the bottom will do the job.
Spread with a spoon until perfectly flat and even.
Next, spoon out the pistachio knafeh mixture. Be generous, and spread it evenly over the layer of milk chocolate.
Finally, seal the mould with another layer of milk chocolate, while being careful not to disturb the middle layer.
Put this in the fridge – once set, enjoy!
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