Mirzam Chocolate has opened in AlSerkal Avenue in Dubai and it is the Charlie & The Chocolate Factory of your dreams (minus the possibly child murders). It is Dubai's first bean-to-bar chocolatier.
The Team at Mirzam Chocolatier encourages you to take part in their chocolate-making process, and it's unlike anything you've ever seen (unless of course you work at a chocolatier).
Timmy Vilhelmsson, one of the employees's t Mirzam Chocolate explained the process to What's On Dubai, step-by-step. Once the cocoa beans arrive from their plantation, the first step is to sort them out by hand.
After they are sorted, the beans are roasted, which all happens in-house. Depending on the origin of the bean, they roast the cocoa beans between half an hour to an hour.
After the beans have been roasted, they need to be cooled.
After this comes the actual chocolate-making process which includes 3 key ingredients: Cocoa nibs, cocoa butter and unrefined cane sugar. They add this mixture into a big grinder which sometimes takes up to 7 days to completely finish.
Then they put the chocolate in a method called "tempering" which is heating and cooling the chocolate several times. It is then poured into Mirzan's special molds, cooled off and wrapped my hand.
All their wrappers are hand-painted, most with a story of the adventure Mirzan takes in order to gather the exotic ingredients required to make the bar.
There are other paintings, some with saffron watercolor, others with geometric figures, but all are hand-painted.
Check out some of their wrappings and the video from What's On Dubai below.