Ben brought 1kg of pistachios home from Istanbul and they’ve been bored to death in the fridge since then, waiting to be assigned to a more important and exciting duty.

Although I’m planning on using them for other savoury adventures, in my head I wanted to combine the pistachios with something sweet too… white chocolate and perhaps strawberries; that’s how this experiment started, and that’s exactly what I googled. I found this very simple recipe, which calls for freeze-dried strawberries, but I wondered if I could dry them at home, learn a new thing and save some extra €€€ in the process. I found these instructions for drying strawberries in the oven and decided to try. It is a long process, I won’t lie, but for me, this was more about trying something new.

In this case, I bought dark chocolate (85% cacao) and white chocolate bars. However, to save money, I would recommend buying melting buttons/callets. You can easily find them online, and the price/kg is typically half or less of what you would pay for a chocolate bar at the shop.

The result is a delicious mix of chocolaty flavours with a nice crunch, sweet sourness and spicy touch, which is optional of course. Not quite sure when I’d eat this, perhaps as a sweet ending to a dinner with friends or a midnight craving?

It looks and tastes a bit crazier than a plain chocolate bar, and you can also “proudly” say you made it yourself if they ask… 🙂 I also have to add that playing around with melted chocolate is one of those weird relaxing things that everyone loves, regardless of their age!

If you have some strawberries and melted choco left, you can use it to do something like this – pretty cool!

I hope you enjoy,

Silvia

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RECIPE

Total time: 2h drying strawberries + 15mins to prepare chocolate + 3h fridge or until chocolate hardens

Notes: quantities are rough and you can’t really go wrong, proportions are not that important here.

Ingredients

• A bunch of strawberries, sliced into not-too-thick slices (3-4mm?)
• Unsalted pistachios
• Dark chocolate (1 part)
• White chocolate (2 parts)
• Pinch of salt
• Pepper (I had black & pink pepper at home, the pink made it go well with the strawberries!)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 150ºC, on vent/upper grill mode.
2. Place a baking sheet on a baking tray. Place strawberry slices so that they don’t touch each other. Cook in the oven for about 2h. Half-way through flip the slices so they dry evenly on both sides. Strawberries are ready when they are not mushy and make a slight “crack” sound when cut. Larger slices will take a few minutes longer. Beware of blackish edges! They might be a bit sour/strong.
3. Break 1-2 bars of each type of chocolate into pieces, place in 2 different glass bowls, add a pinch of salt to each and melt in the microwave.
4. Chop the dried strawberries into smaller pieces. Roughly, chop the pistachios too. Save a portion for later, then add equal amounts of strawberries & pistachios to the two chocolate-filled bowls
5. On a smaller baking tray, place a new baking sheet. Pour the chocolate mixes alternatively until there’s no more chocolate. Add remaining strawberries & pistachios as toppings, add some freshly cracked pink pepper.
6. Leave in the fridge for about 4h. Cut into pieces and indulge!