My best advice for anyone seeking a crowd-pleasing chocolate dessert that requires no baking, minimal technique, and primarily pantry ingredients: Turn to meat. More specifically, cured, mold-encased meat secured with twine. You’re reading this correctly. Your next dessert should be salami—made from chocolate.
Chocolate salami is a hand-rolled tube of chocolate stuffed with biscuits, nuts, and dried fruits. When sliced, the dessert uncannily resembles the cross section of dried sausages like soppressata and kielbasa. While chocolate salami is the dessert’s Italian-American alias, this tubular treat has many names throughout the world: It’s “salame de chocolate” in Portugal, “sokseh” in Estonia, “chocolate kolbosa” in Russia, and “cookie chip chocolate” on Reddit. In other words, it’s (likely) the only plant-based meat with global approval.
Chocolate salami’s widespread fanbase is no fluke. The dessert—which has been around for at least 100 years—carries a delicious balance of sweet, savory, crunchy, and chewy notes in each bite. And, like real charcuterie, chocolate salami plays for a crowd. We like ours sliced and served on a platter alongside plenty of amaro and espresso, but if you wanted to build an entire dessert-focused “charcuterie” board, that’d be even better.
As is the case with actual sausage, the possibilities for customizing chocolate salami are endless. For example, the most popular chocolate salami recipe on our site soaks dried cranberries in orange liqueur before combining them with the other ingredients. Meanwhile, NYC-based chef and restaurateur Christian Petroni prefers to soak cherries in whiskey before adding them to his mix. Point being, you could swap one booze-soaked fruit for another, and the salamis would still work.
Don’t just take my word for it. And in this case, the comments aren’t just positive—they’re insightful. For instance, community member Jana E recommends building two smaller chocolate sausages—something that could work great if you’re considering gifting this to multiple people. Even better, one community member, who operates under the username RavensFeast, suggests dusting the sausage in powdered sugar to imitate the white mold often found on salami. (If you’re looking for an example of this in action, check out Christian’s video).
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Have you made chocolate salami? Let us know in the comments below!
Paul Hagopian
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