Our members were transported to Dubai this month to taste the chocolate of Mirzam, a craft chocolate maker inspired by the ancient spice routes of the Middle East.
If the term “Dubai chocolate” conjures up images of chocolate bars filled with neon-green pistachio paste and crispy bits of pastry, you’re not alone. A new-ish chocolate fad started by a Dubai company in 2021, “Dubai Chocolate” refers to a specific filled chocolate bar. The only thing that “Dubai Chocolate” shares with Mirzam Chocolate is that they both started in Dubai. Mirzam Chocolate has been crafting bean-to-bar chocolate since 2016, long before pistachio-filled bars became a meme.
Passion as a Qualification
Passion is what qualified Kathy Johnston for her role as the Chief Chocolate Officer at Mirzam Chocolate. Like many craft chocolate makers she came to the job with no formal training, but she had a passion for three things - chocolate, science and storytelling - each an important ingredient for success.
Kathy tells a childhood story of stacking chairs in a ladder formation to reach the top kitchen cabinet where her mother stored chocolate. It’s reminiscent of stories I’ve heard from other club members and industry experts who harbored so much love for chocolate they resorted to ingenious means to access their mom’s stash as small children.
A native New Zealander, Kathy has lived in Dubai since the age of three. She left a career in marketing and events to pursue one in chocolate. With only a plane ticket in hand, she planned to head to Switzerland to follow her chocolate dream until kismet intervened and brought her together with an Emirati brother and sister who were looking to start a chocolate factory. They convinced her to stay in Dubai, and she ended up with her dream job.
Nobody Expected This in Dubai
The initial plan was to make chocolate in Dubai and export it to the US where chocolate consumers had a palate for dark chocolate. Mirzam expected it would take time to build a local following among clientele with a taste for sweet milk chocolate. When they opened their first factory & store in 2016 they immediately sold out. They’ve since grown from one employee to more than 75, they’ve moved the factory to a larger location and they’ve opened a second store & café. More recently they opened Birch Bakery, where Kathy is also the Chief Sourdough Officer.
Chocolate That Follows the Spice Route
Mirzam draws on its Middle Eastern heritage as a rich palette for experimenting with flavors and spices that evoke the ancient maritime spice route from Japan through the Middle East to Europe. Each of its chocolates has a rich story that drives product development. They rely on cacao and ingredients from the spice route, using single-origins such as India, Vietnam and Madagascar, with spices such as vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and saffron. Ingredients are chosen not only for their flavor, but for their historical legacy of trade, travel and storytelling.
Mirzam is the name of a star. It's a star that was historically used by spice traders for navigation. They sailed all the way from the southern tip of Japan to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, India, and then also down the east coast of Africa, to Zanzibar, Tanzania and Madagascar. Sailors would travel around the world collecting spices and bring them back to the souks and markets across the Middle East and North Africa, and then take them up to Europe. We look for cocoa beans that are grown along this historical spice route. - Kathy Johnston
What Was in the Box
While I’ve provided some of my own tasting notes, below, I’d like to remind you that tasting notes are personal. What you taste may be completely different based on your own experiences and sensory memories. If everything just tastes like chocolate, that’s fine, too! Whatever you do or don’t notice, all that really matters is that you enjoy yourself!
Cuba 85%
This is an intensely chocolaty bar with notes of tropical fruit and hints of cashew, and citrus. It has pleasant astringency and bitterness, traits that are natural to cacao and something I expect of a high-percent chocolate. Astringency is the mouth-drying feeling that may remind you of tasting raw walnuts or banana peels. These can be positive or negative traits, depending upon how they present themselves in the finished chocolate. When I judge for the International Chocolate Awards, I have the ability to add points if the astringency or bitterness are pleasant, or I can take away points if they’re unpleasant. This chocolate is made with 2-ingredients - cacao beans and sugar. We were lucky to get our hands on this bar, which Mirzam no longer makes. It’s one that Kathy particularly likes.
I really wanted to add something to our lineup of single origins to be able to show customers the difference in geography when you are making chocolate, and just how different it can be. The cocoa beans that are grown in Cuba are huge, they're double the size of the beans that we get from the farm we work with in India. And they are much higher natural content of cocoa butter. So, there's only 2 ingredients in the 85% bar, we don't need to add anything else, and it's so buttery. - Kathy Johnston
India 62%
On my first taste I notice a hint of floral, followed by mango and tropical fruits. At the finish I taste nuts, bread, cream, and chocolate. I’m really enjoying this bar, which is significantly sweeter than the Cuba bar. If you read the ingredients, you’ll notice that this is a 3-ingredient chocolate meaning that in addition to cacao beans and sugar, Mirzam also added cocoa butter.
I believe the plantation is just so interesting, because they've become fully sustainable over many years of practicing and tweaking and getting the right number of animals wandering through the farm. They don't cut the grasses, there's stunning 20 meter high coconut palms everywhere, you feel like you're in paradise. They love their trees so much, and they went on to win a Cacao of Excellence award in Paris for their beans. We won 2 awards for our 65% India. It's my favorite of all of our single origins from the spice route. - Kathy Johnston
Halwa Dark Chocolate 62% (Emirati Collection)
Inspired by Omani Halwa, this 62% dark chocolate is spiked with caramel brittle, rose, saffron, dates, almonds and pistachios. Omani Halwa is a dessert that's slow-cooked, spiced, and always shared. These flavors evoke visions of a Middle Eastern souk with its bins overflowing with colorful spices and air scented with fragrant aromas.
This bar was part of our Emirati collection, 5 different chocolate bars that reflect authentic Dubai desserts. We make a toffee brittle that has saffron, beautiful organic Bulgarian rose oil, almonds and pistachios, and then we smash that up and mix it with dark chocolate. When I offer this to people who don't live here, I say, this tastes like Arabic. - Kathy Johnston
Dark Chocolate with Dates & Fennel 62%
This award-winning bar is the one that made me fall in love with Mirzam. Filled with a paste of locally-grown dates and freshly ground fennel, the flavor is balanced, providing just the right amount of bitter chocolate to complement the sweetness of the dates. I first tried this bar when I was putting together bespoke corporate gift boxes for a club member’s clients. I was excited there were bars left over when I was finished.
It was a jam that was a family recipe from one of Mirzam's owners, the Emirati brother and sister that I talked about in the beginning. Their mother would get the leftover dates at the end of the season and make this date preserve that had fennel seeds through it, and this was a bit of an ode to her and to that recipe. - Kathy Johnston
Coconut Dark Milk Chocolate 52%
This was the first milk chocolate Kathy made for Mirzam, an homage to her favorite childhood recipe and a nod to history that goes back thousands of years. Coconut is symbolic of the history of trade between India and the UAE. Early Arabian spice traders sailed the Monsoon winds to India in dhows built from coconut wood and tied together with coconut rope. As far back as 2,000 years ago, coconuts were being carried from India to East Africa, earning the name "zhawzhat al-hind", meaning “walnut of India,” a term still found in Arabic dialects today. This bar is part of Mirzam's Monsoon Collection.
Why We Curate the Way We Do
What I find compelling about Mirzam, and what I hoped would come through in this month's box, is that the chocolate is inseparable from the story. Every bar connects to a place, a trade history, or a cultural tradition. Moving from the buttery intensity of the Cuba 85% to the date-sweetened warmth of the Dates & Fennel bar is not just a change in flavor. It's a change in geography, in history, in the hands that grew the cacao and the choices the maker made along the way. Tasting across the five bars is a way of traveling the spice route vicariously through flavor.
This is what we set out to do with The Chocolate Explorers Club: bring you into contact with makers who have something meaningful to say, and let the chocolate do the talking. Mirzam is one of those makers.
Join Us on the Next Expedition
Every month, we curate a selection of artisan and craft chocolate from small-batch makers around the world, paired with a "Meet the Maker" event where our community gets to dive deeper into the story behind what's in the box. If this is the kind of chocolate exploration you've been looking for, we'd love to have you with us.
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