Same Fruit, Two Completely Different Jobs

We put a date inside chocolate sweetened with dates.

Turns out, dates can do a lot.

Our limited-edition Pistachio Baklava collaboration with The Conscious Bar pairs a whole Medjool date with pistachio baklava-inspired nut butter and chocolate sweetened entirely with dates.

Two brands, opposite instincts

The Conscious Bar makes chocolate from three things: cacao beans, cacao butter, and dates. That is the whole recipe. The fruit is blended in to do the sweetening that refined sugar usually does, which means you would never know it was there just by looking at the bar.

Gato does the opposite. We leave the Medjool exactly where you can see it, because the fruit is not just there to make the thing taste sweet. It gives the whole product its shape, its softness, and its center.

Same ingredient. One brand blends it in, the other builds around it.

Pistachio Baklava is what happens when both approaches end up in the same bite: a whole Medjool coated in chocolate that gets its sweetness from dates too.

There are worse problems than having too many dates.

We left out the pastry

Baklava has a lot going on: layers of crisp phyllo, nuts, sweetness, and, depending on the version, plenty of warm spice. There are countless versions across the Middle East, Mediterranean, North Africa, and beyond, but nuts and sweetness are very good company pretty much everywhere.

Since we’re gluten-free, we skipped the pastry and went straight for the part we always want more of. Our filling is pistachios, almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, raw honey, cinnamon, cardamom, and sea salt. The pistachio leads. The spices warm it up. The honey pulls it together without taking over.

Dates have been here for a while

Dates are not having a moment. They have had several thousand years.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, they have been grown, eaten, gifted, stuffed, cooked with, and served at the table for generations. Long before they showed up in wellness aisles and ingredient lists as a “natural sweetener,” people already knew exactly what to do with them.

Which is fair. A good date is basically built-in dessert: soft, sticky, caramel-like, and naturally very good at its job.

That is the part we keep coming back to.

The ingredient is ancient. The obsession is not.

Old ingredients, rearranged

A soft Medjool. Pistachio Baklava nut butter. Three-ingredient chocolate sweetened with dates. Cacao nibs. Flaky sea salt.

None of these ingredients are particularly new. We are not claiming to have discovered any of them.

The interesting part is what happens when familiar things get put together differently.

Pistachio Baklava also uses a different chocolate from the rest of the Gato lineup. Instead of our usual 70% cacao sweetened with unrefined coconut sugar, this one is dipped in The Conscious Bar’s three-ingredient, date-sweetened chocolate.

It changes the whole bite and makes this feel like a true collaboration, not just a new Gato flavor.

Pistachio Baklava launches August 24

Gato x The Conscious Bar Pistachio Baklava launches August 24 for a limited time.