Seoul chocolate

step aside, dubai

안녕하세요, clowns!

Today’s installment of Food is Stupid tackles a trendy food fad that’s been floating around the internet for much longer than I thought it would: Dubai chocolate.

If you are not familiar with this stuff, Dubai chocolate involves a chocolate bar that is filled with pistachio cream, along with crunchy shredded phyllo bits called kadayif. This chocolate bar did indeed originate from a chocolatier in Dubai (called FIX Dessert Chocolatier), and it first went viral in 2023 when it showed up on TikTok.

The thing is, this Dubai chocolate bar has had some serious staying power. Two years later, and the demand for this thing is showing no signs of slowing down. I’m seeing versions of this shit showing up everywhere; there’s even a Crumbl brownie version coming soon. As soon as it became popular, knockoffs immediately sprung up left and right, with versions making their way as far as Trader Joe’s. And even the 7-Eleven right by our apartment.

Yep, Davida and I bought one out of curiosity recently. This thing cost a whopping $9.99, but hey, at least it was pretty good. I mean, it’s chocolate, pistachio, and little fried-tasting crunchy bits, what’s not to like?

But then I thought, well, why let Dubai have all the fun? Why can’t another city have a cool chocolate bar? I mean, I’m a proud Korean-American, and there are lots of delicious Korean flavors out there (and hey, our food is trendy as shit too).

So I came up with two Korean-inspired chocolate bar ideas, involving some traditional (and not-so-traditional) ingredients. Including multiple bean products. And instant ramen. Oh, and there’s a McRib meat mold involved too, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Also, as it turns out, chocolate is not that easy to work with.

I got most of the ingredients for these “Seoul” chocolate bars (as I’d call them) from our local Korean grocery store down the street, but I did have to make a fun detour to a slightly different place too.

Davida and I headed to Michael’s, the hobby supply store, to get some decorative melting chocolate wafers. After strolling through the aisles containing sewing gear, arts and crafts stuff, and picture frames, it was weird thinking I was at Michael’s to essentially pick up groceries.

My first of the two bars would include instant ramen noodles for the crunchy portion.

After all, instant ramen noodles are sort of like kadayif in that they’re fried, which removes all their moisture prior to packaging. That package of ramen you see in my hand, however, is a unique one.

That’s because this stuff is called Ppushu Ppushu, which means “crush-crush.” It is literally a package of instant ramen, including a seasoning packet, that you’re meant to eat uncooked. Kids in Korea sometimes eat regular instant ramen out of the bag with the seasoning sprinkled on top as a snack, so this brand, which makes regular instant ramen, simply capitalized on this concept in a cheeky way.

I just crushed the noodles in the package as directed to turn them into crumbly little bits, except I kept them unseasoned for the purpose of the Seoul chocolate.

But since I had never had this snack before, I did sneak out one little piece, and sprinkled some of the tteokbokki-flavored (rice cakes in spicy red pepper sauce) seasoning on top.

Man, this was way better than it had any right to be. What’s sort of amazing is that the seasoning packet was both salty and sweet, just like tteokbokki, and that strong sweetness is what caught me off guard. I am glad I did not discover these snacks any sooner, because I would probably have eaten a lot of them. I already have high blood pressure and I do not need to go to the doctor for another reason.

(Sigh.)

For the paste component, I decided to use sweet red bean, which is a key ingredient for a lot of Korean (and East Asian) desserts.

Some of my non-Asian friends get weirded out by the idea of sweetened beans, but basically, it’s like sugary starch puree. Calm down, guys, it’s fine.

I mixed the crunchy instant ramen noodles with the red bean paste until I got a fairly cohesive mass together.

Then I set it aside while I made my second filling.

For the crunchy part in this bar, I decided to use these honey butter-flavored potato chips.

These things are awesome. They do in fact taste like honey and butter, but they aren’t obnoxiously sweet, and are still a bit salty at the same time. It is hard to stop eating them. Honey butter chips also went viral for a while, but that fad did thankfully simmer down, and now you can get these things whenever you want at most Asian grocery stores.

In this case, the paste holding everything together would be doenjang, or fermented bean paste.

If you have never had it, doenjang is fairly similar to Japanese miso, but I’d say it has a slightly more aggressive flavor to it. We use it for the base of soups, among other things.

I crunched up the honey butter chips and mixed them with a bunch of the doenjang so everything clumped up together in a big wad.

Now it was time to put everything into the mold.

But this isn’t just any mold. It’s a silicone boneless rib patty mold made by my friend Tony, who sells them via RibSammy.com. Nope, no sponsored funny business, though he did send me these for free three years ago just because he thought I’d find them entertaining. This mold was the perfect size to make Seoul chocolates with.

I pressed both the red bean and ramen along with the doenjang and honey butter chip mixtures into the Rib Sammy mold, and let the bars set up in the freezer for a few hours.

Once the bars had hardened to my liking, I poured some dark chocolate melting wafers into a glass pan and microwaved them on low power until they melted.

Then I added some red ones (red to represent the red bean, get it?) to see if I could make a cool pattern, and melted those too.

I’d had all these grandiose images in my head of making a pretty chocolate bar, but this was not as easy as I thought it would be.

For some reason I had it in my head that the chocolate would be as smooth and as liquidy like in those unnecessarily sexy Lindt chocolate commercials, but my first attempt to enrobe a bar looked like a fudgy mess.

I did my pathetic best to fill in all the crevasses of the red bean and ramen Seoul chocolate bar, and set it on a sheet tray lined with parchment paper to hang out.

I decided to go with a slightly different chocolating (I declare “chocolating” as a word now) strategy for the doenjang and honey butter chip version, and I whipped out my silicone food brush.

Though this took some more labor, it did work a bit better.

I was also able to smear the melted salted caramel wafers on top of the chocolate layer artfully, which is to say, it looked like I was smearing some doodoo on some more doodoo. But, that is my style, after all. I like to call it “Poo Chic.”

I let the bars set up for a while in the fridge, and honestly, they didn’t come out looking all that bad.

Though now that I’m looking at that photo closely, they do sort of look like cell phones that fell into some fudge. And also, you can’t really see any swirly red color in the red bean one, which is some horseshit.

Part of the virality of a Dubai chocolate bar is watching someone crack them in half in a video.

It’s sort of gross but hypnotic to watch, because you get this attractive and shiny chocolate bar that’s busted open, exposing this soft green-brown stuff in the middle. I didn’t quite get that action with the red bean and ramen bar (I thought it’d be more dramatic).

Biting into this held another surprise. It tasted pretty good, nice and sweet in an inoffensive way, along with being starchy from the noodle squiggles and the beans. But one key thing about the ramen had changed. It was now soft. That crunch I was expecting was completely absent, and instead, I just got a mouthful of mush. In retrospect, I should have absolutely been expecting that, since the moisture from the beans would naturally have transferred to the noodles. But I wasn’t, so I was hit in the balls with disappointment.

The doenjang and honey butter chip bar split open in a much more satisfying way, with crags and layers, kind of like the interior of a Butterfinger bar.

But to get the full effect, I figured I could dust the thing with ramen seasoning before I took a bite.

Except, before you read the next sentence, think carefully, what’s wrong with this scenario? I realized just now, as I sit here typing this, that this wasn’t the bar with the ramen in it. I had meant to be clever by adding the ramen seasoning to the ramen Seoul bar. Whoops. Would the extra added seasoning be why this bite was unpalatably salty? No. Doenjang is already by nature extremely salty. You’re only supposed to use a little bit of it to cook with, maybe a few tablespoons at a time. This was just way too much sodium all at once.

Not to say it wasn’t delicious, because it was, in an explosively savory way. But that salt overwhelmed everything, and even the sugar from the chocolate wasn’t enough to offset it. The chips, like the ramen, also got soggy — but this time I’d expected it.

Okay, Dubai, you win. I will humbly concede defeat, your pistachio and kadayif version is very good, if not expensive. I do not have what it takes to make a Seoul chocolate bar. Also, nobody was asking for this fight anyway. We have way too much of that bullshit going on right now. But hold that thought. I’ll be right back, I gotta head out to the Korean grocery store real quick. I need to get like a case of tteokboki-flavored Ppushu Ppushu, for, uh, scientific purposes.

Don’t worry, I’ll pick up a few extra for you guys to try too. We gotta have one thing to look forward to. Because goddamn.

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