The great Dubai chocolate tile scam: no pistachios, just fake creams and flavorings.

Santa Cristina de Aro / VicThe chocolate tile filled with pistachio praline and toasted pastry kataifi (a type of filo pastry) has become a mass phenomenon that has divided chocolatiers into two camps: those who don't want to know anything about it, because they find it commercial; and those who have started making it because they consider it to be as good an invention as After Eight, which was created in the United Kingdom in 1962. The fact is that this innovative chocolate tile, created by the Egyptian Sarah Hamouda in 2022, has a high price due to the filling, specifically the praline, the pistachios with sugar, because the nuts cost around thirty euros per kilo. Therefore, the chocolatier Lluc Crusellas He says that "if you find a Dubai chocolate for two euros, it's a fake Dubai tile, without pistachios."

This past summer, at the Santa Cristina de Aro market La Santa MarketAnyone who stopped by chocolatier Lluc Crusellas's stall quickly captured the passion the Dubai tile aroused. Teenagers bought it and took photos immediately, smiling and holding the chocolate, as if they had acquired a trophy to boast about. An elderly couple from Granada bought four tiles at once because they claimed they were to give as gifts. "It's a chocolate we know will make us look good," they explained. Meanwhile, Lluc Crusellas stated that since he started making it last April, Dubai is his best-selling chocolate, and he sells it for €13.90 (the tile weighs 200 grams). Along with the tiles, green and gold on the outside and green with threads on the inside, the chocolatier sold a thousand and one delicacies, all delicious and innovative in formats and flavors: like the cheesecake or the hot chocolate that flowed from four fountains and could be eaten with fresh fruit. Anything in the windows of the La Santa Market stall was worth the price. Dubai shone above all, and created queues to buy it. "Surely, this Christmas it will remain at the same sales level as nougat, because it has become a cult tile, given as a gift for novelty, for the innovation of eating milk chocolate with a pistachio crunch and kataifi", the chocolatier continues. In other words, the reason for Dubai's passion is largely due to the curiosity to discover a chocolate that didn't exist until now.

How to spot fake Dubai chocolate

We return to fake Dubai tiles, and how to spot them. The low price is the first indicator that the Dubai chocolate we're buying doesn't have pistachios; the other signs should be looked for in the ingredients list. "It must say the word pistachio, and it must contain a high amount because it is the main ingredient of the filling," says Crusellas. To continue, there must also be chocolate, of course, which is usually milk chocolate; kataifi and sugar; and optional ingredients can be white chocolate and coconut. "When there's no pistachio, there can be a substitute cream, which is difficult to decipher as an ingredient," explains Crusellas. The authentic Dubai has pistachios, just as the After Eight contains mint. And precisely for this reason, because it contains pistachios, the Dubai tile is expensive, because a kilo of this nut has a high price: it's around thirty euros at the market. The rest of the ingredients are cheaper, although a kilo of cocoa isn't as cheap as it used to be, but nevertheless, the cost is around 10/12 euros per kilo. That is, "The price has dropped this summer compared to last year, when it cost 16-18 euros."says chocolatier Lluc Crusellas, who claims to use milk chocolate with a cocoa content of 43%.

About the pasta kataifi, which we could compare to the filaments of filo pastry, is commonly used in Arabic pastry making and is affordable. "The kataifi We can associate it with the crunchy batter some chefs use to coat prawns; in the case of Dubai chocolate, we roast them to combine them with the pistachio praline," says the chocolatier, who notes that with each bite, the filaments stick out alongside the praline.

To understand the global passion for Dubai, we must connect it with the passion for chocolate. Eating it generates endorphins, and therefore combats negative emotions, such as sadness or boredom. This is due to two components, difficult to pronounce but well known scientifically: Phenethylamine and anandamide, which in the case of the first component is popularly known as "the happiness molecule", as nutritionist Dr. Anna Costa asserts. However, as with all foods, moderate consumption is what provides benefits to the body. In other words, for chocolate consumption to have only beneficial effects, the recommendation is to choose one with a high cocoa content. In Dubai's case, most of the tiles are milk chocolate, with a low cocoa content and therefore low in sugar and fat. Therefore, the recommendation is to eat it regularly, like a sweet treat.

In the Barcelona pastry guild, manager Olivier Fernández maintains that the Dubai chocolate tile is successful because of its ingredients. "They're good separately, and together, even better," he says, adding that he started making it a year ago. "My eighteen-year-old daughter, Martina, told me that on TikTok everyone was talking about Dubai chocolate as an extraordinary product. At first, I didn't pay attention to her, but I listened because other times when she had told me about phenomenal products from social media, I saw that they were very popular with the public." It was like that with Dubai chocolate. It was just the beginning of making it, like one of the tiles that Olivier Fernández prepares within the project. Bean to bar (in Catalan, from the bean to the tile; the producer controls all its phases), and noted that Dubai stood out. "Currently, everything that has pistachios and preparations with pistachios is popular, and I can assure you because this summer in The ice cream shop I have in Ibiza, 97-12"º, the best-selling ice cream has been the Dubai chocolate, on the one hand, and the pistachio, on the other," he points out. Like all commercial phenomena, the usual debate among chocolatiers is whether it's worth doing what everyone else is doing or discarding it precisely because of this fact. "We could also discuss it with the film world." Life is beautiful; in the end, we chocolatiers also want to sell the tiles because we know that those with a high percentage of cocoa are difficult to sell, as they have a limited audience," says Olivier Fernández. They cost 25 euros per kilo, and he already buys them roasted. the chocolate, the kataifi and sugar). Finally, Dubai will endure; it's not a passing fad, but rather a favorite in flavor catalogs that everyone will recognize, like mint chocolate, After Eight.