If you’ve ever read ‘Charlie & the Chocolate Factory’ by Roald Dahl or watched the movie Willy Wonka, you’ve probably dreamed of setting foot inside a chocolate factory one day.
Well, Mirzam Chocolate Factory in Dubai’s Al Quoz is offering the golden tickets to visit their factory, showing you everything there is to see about chocolate making from bean to bar.
The venue is a one-stop shop for many things. It’s a café with a small batch bakery, a shop where you can buy all sorts of different flavored chocolate, and a factory where you can see every stage of the chocolate making process from roasting the cocoa beans into making the beautifully wrapped chocolate bars.
CHOCOLATE FACTORY TOUR & TASTINGS
The best part of it all is that you can actually book a tour of the factory where they walk you throughout the entire journey. The Chocolate Factory Tour & Tastings is one where you get to learn about where they source the cocoa beans from, which are all single-origin, meaning they come from a single place, a farm or country, rather than blends. Mirzam sources their single-origin beans from 8 places around the globe which are Vietnam, Indonesia, Madagascar, Tanzania, Papa New Guinea, Ghana, Cuba and India. While coffee is grown in many countries around the world, Mirzam specifically looks for cocoa beans that are grown in the same places that Arab traders from this region traveled to hundreds of years ago to get spices. So the same trails as the Spice Route, the Silk Road, and even the Triangle Trade Route.
Once you learn about the origins, the team walks you through the roasting process and you see all the incredible steps that lead to making this delicious dessert which you get to indulge in through tastings.
COFFEE & COCOA PAIRING WORKSHOP
This workshop teaches you how to pair certain single origin coffees with the cocoa that goes best with it which is amazing! I’ve only ever done this with cheese, so imagine with something sweet like chocolate. You sit down at the café where the team has a table set up with chocolate on a tray and coffee brewing. Then, an expert will guide you on the different combinations, where the cocoa beans come from, and the coffee and chocolate flavor notes you’ll get to taste. If this was school, I don’t think I would ever skip class.
CAFÉ AND SHOP
Mirzam has a spacious and sunlit café where one can sip on their brew, catch up with friends, or sit back and work. Their Aseeda Fondant is incredibly popular and a gooey classic served with saffron gelato.
The shop is amazing because it has every brilliant concoction they’ve created for sale available as chocolate bars, DIY boxes to take home, and gift sets for various occasions. They have some incredible flavors that are unique to the culture here in the UAE. For example, dates and cardamom, halwa, honeycomb made with UAE honey, and logaimat which are the UAE-style donuts.
Their illustrated wrappers are a work of art. They commission artists to design them by hand, so each chocolate bar flavor looks different than the other. I almost didn’t want to open mine so I wouldn’t ruin it. Almost being the key word here.
So all in all, perfect day out. Their workshops are a great way to be educated on the art of chocolate-making.
Website: www.mirzam.com. Operating hours are from 9AM until 9PM, 7 days a week. Tours run on various days and prices start at 60 Dirhams. Workshops are currently held in private for your own group for social-distancing purposes, and they’ve got activities for kids too including wrapper painting!