Melomakarona, Greece’s traditional sweet that screams Christmas, has remained a simple recipe of flour, olive oil, honey, and citrus for centuries. While slightly different versions have been appearing in recent years, this season’s new variety of melomakarona, inspired by the Dubai Chocolate global craze, has been taking Greeks by storm.
Bakeries and pastry shops across Greece have been frantically preparing for the holiday season, and, this year, alongside trays filled with the familiar melomakarona Greeks remain in love with, one variety they’ve never seen before stands out: Dubai melomakarona (as they’re known in Greece), loaded with the viral chocolate’s mouth-watering filling of shredded, crunchy kataifi (thin layers of pastry dough also known as knafeh in the Middle East), then mixed with pistachio praline and finally wrapped up in a thick layer of chocolate and sprinkled with ground pistachios. Simply put, it is a traditionally Greek Christmas treat with a Middle Eastern twist.
How a Greek pastry shop created its first Dubai melomakarono
“There are people who come to our pastry shop and ask specifically for the Dubai melomakarona,” Thanasis Papadopoulos, co-owner and pastry chef at the Caravel Patisserie in the port city of Patras in the eastern Peloponnese, tells Greek Reporter. “They make up 30 to 40 percent of our total melomakarona sales, and they sell like hot cakes.”
The 52-year-old baker has spent his entire life making and creating sweets in the family-owned pastry shop, but it was the children of the family who introduced him to Dubai Chocolate, a fad that has been trending all over social media since the beginning of the year.
“We started making different Dubai Chocolate sweets in September, which was late,” Papadopoulos says.
“We didn’t expect to see such enthusiasm,” he adds, saying that their Dubai range includes ice-cream, ekmek, chocolates, and even the actual Dubai filling sold in jars. It was no surprise that when the holiday season approached, they wanted to try and incorporate the trend into the seasonal melomakarona cookie. But that didn’t exactly come easily.
“We experimented,” says Papadopoulos. The first experiment was unsuccessful, as Papadopoulos filled the melomakarono dough with the pistachio-based filling and then baked the cookies.
When they came out of the oven and were tried, the melomakarona “had lost in taste, in appearance. When we put something in the oven, baking creates losses, like that of the aroma.” he says.
Then they tried something else. Using the original recipe, they baked the melomakarona first, and, while they were still hot, they added a thick layer of Dubai filling on top, and then poured over lots of chocolate.
Since then, Dubai melomakarona have been officially selling at Papadopoulos’ pastry shop for 19.90 euros ($21.05) per kilo—the most expensive melomakarona variety they carry and the reason why, according to Papadopoulos, Greeks are buying them in smaller quantities.
Dubai melomakarona break the bank in Athens, but Greeks still buy them
With a price of almost 24 euros ($25.39) per kilo at a local bakery and pastry shop in the northern suburbs of Athens, Varvara, an employee at Martini’s bakery, admits that the Dubai melomakarona are expensive.
“The price of cocoa has been skyrocketing,” she explains, “and pistachios are also very pricey.” She says they are exclusively using Aegina pistachios, the variety that grows on the Greek island of the Argosaronic Gulf which has been recently named the best pistachio variety in the world. In the Greek retail market, a kilo of Aegina pistachios costs almost 38 euros ($40.19) while a small jar of pistachio praline sells for about 6 euros ($6.34).
While Varvara admits that the original, traditional recipe makes up well over half of their total melomakarona sales, it’s the younger generation that is more informed about the latest trend, knows about their existence and subsequently buys them. While the bakery began selling Dubai melomakarona only a few days ago, which by some is considered late in the holiday season, their selling potential is already there.
“The fact is that those who do buy Dubai melomakarona, in general they like them so much that they come back for more,” she says, adding that older Greeks, while they do ask what they are and appear tempted to buy them, “in the end, almost always end up going to the tray with the traditional ones and buy those. They choose what they know, what is familiar to them.”
New melomakarona varieties appear almost every year
While the Dubai melomakarona is the new in-thing among Greece’s holiday sweets that some people are raving about, pastry chefs and bakers have been adjusting the original recipe for years, either depending on what’s trendy and hot or by being creative themselves.
A few years ago when red velvet, the famous red-hued American cake, became a hot trend in Greece, it started appearing in all shapes and forms in Greek bakeries, including the original cake, muffins, croissants, cookies, and of course, melomakarona.
At the same time, as modern consumerism continues to engulf Greece, bakeries and pastry shops keep coming up with every melomakarona variety imaginable, catering to the taste and needs of literally everyone: shrouded in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, without sugar, with stevia sweetener, in small bites, stuffed with chocolate praline, Oreo melomakarona. The list goes on.
Despite the massive Dubai chocolate blitz across social media platforms, many Greek users have criticized the latest imported mania that tweaks once again their beloved, traditional Christmas cookie. Some have described the Dubai melomakarona as “unacceptable,” others blasted the Dubai chocolate craze saying “enough is enough,” while yet others have said that we shouldn’t be changing the traditions “we have found from our grandmothers and grandfathers.”
A chocolate made in Dubai that caused a worldwide craze
The original Dubai chocolate is a candy bar cleverly called “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” from Dubai-based Fix Dessert Chocolatier. There, founder Sarah Hamouda creates a series of handmade, stuffed chocolate bars, including with vanilla custard, caramel and fudge, and Nutella brownies.
But it was the pistachio-cream bar that gave her company traction, along with the actual Dubai chocolate bar. Within months after Hamouda’s viral TikTok video, Dubai chocolate became omnipresent across all social media platforms, and people from all over the world have been trying to get their hands on it. T
aking advantage of the high demand, more and more chocolate manufactures worldwide are launching their own versions of Dubai chocolate. The internet is also awash with recipes and Dubai chocolate products, including cosmetics and makeup that are sold in packages resembling the shape and colors of the scrumptious Dubai sweet.
Melomakarona, the original Greek, timeless tradition
Typical ingredients for the traditional melomakarona are flour or semolina, sugar, orange zest and/or fresh juice, cognac. cinnamon, crushed or ground clove and olive oil. During rolling, they are often filled with ground walnuts. Immediately after baking, they are immersed for a few seconds in cold syrup made of honey and sugar dissolved in water. Finally they are decorated with ground and chopped walnuts.
The origin of melomakarona, surprisingly, dates all the way back to ancient Greece. At funerals, ancient Greeks would eat a barley mixture called “makaria.” Scholars argue that through the years, makaria developed into the cookie we know today. The addition of honey or “meli” in Greek to the cookie, gives us the name “melomakarona.”
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