The Dilly Bar Story
The Dilly Bar is a frozen confection that got its start in 1935 when James L. Murray came up with the idea of dunking a chocolate-covered almond bar into ice cream and then dipping the whole thing in a chocolate shell. It was originally called the "Murray Bar" and he sold them from a pushcart outside his drug store in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two years later he licensed the formula to the Marks Brothers Ice Cream Company, who started producing them under the name Dilly Bar. That is the basic
History Of The Dilly Bar
right there. What made it different from everything else on the market at the time was the double-coating technique. You take a rectangular chocolate-almond bar, freeze it solid, dip it in soft-serve or vanilla ice cream, then flash-freeze it again and dip it once more in a chocolate coating. The result is a shell that cracks when you bite it instead of bending. That texture is the whole point of the thing. I used to work a summer job at an ice cream shop back in 2009 and we hand-dipped these every afternoon during the heat waves. The trick nobody tells you is that the bar has to be rock hard before the first dip. If it is even slightly soft in the middle, the chocolate coating will slide off completely and you end up with a mess on the conveyor belt. We kept a separate freezer set about four degrees colder than the rest just for the bars. Worth the energy cost if you care about waste.The Marks Brothers operation grew fast. By 1940 they had moved production into a proper factory. Nestlé bought the rights in 1966 and that is when the Dilly Bar started showing up in grocery stores across the country rather than just at soda fountains and ice cream parlors. They changed the coating formula a bit over the years, added strawberry and mint varieties, and later rebranded it under the Dreyer's name after Nestlé sold its U.S. ice cream business to Edy's in 2001. The core recipe has not changed much since the late sixties. If you want to make them at home, the main obstacle is temperature control. Most home freezers sit around zero Fahrenheit. That is cold enough for ice cream storage but borderline for getting a proper shell. I found that putting the dipped bars in the freezer section of my refrigerator for fifteen minutes between dips works better than hoping one long freeze does the job. You lose some efficiency but you gain consistency. The coating stays adhered and you do not get those ugly air bubbles that form when trapped moisture gets released during a single deep freeze. Another thing people get wrong is the chocolate. Using chocolate chips straight from the bag will give you a thick, waxy coating that chips off in big flakes. Melt the chocolate with a small amount of coconut oil or shortening. About one teaspoon per ounce of chocolate is the right ratio. The fat thins it out so it coats evenly and creates a thinner, crisper shell that actually snaps instead of cracking into shards.
The original Murray Bar used a milk chocolate almond center. If you want to go traditional you can use Hershey's bars or any decent milk chocolate bar studded with chopped almonds. Some commercial versions use a nougat layer instead. That is fine but it changes the texture profile completely and honestly it is less interesting to eat. The downsides of making these at home are real. The process takes longer than you think, mostly because of the repeated freezing steps. Plan on about two hours from start to finish for a batch of twelve. The other problem is humidity. If your kitchen is warm and damp, the chocolate will seize or bloom. I learned that the hard way during a July cookout when half my batch turned white and grainy. Moving the whole operation into the air-conditioned kitchen and keeping the chocolate covered when not in use solved it. There is no single official recipe source you can download. Nestlé never published the factory formula and the Marks Brothers records from the thirties are not publicly accessible. What you will find online are copycat recipes built from reverse engineering the product. They are close enough for home use if you adjust the ratios yourself.
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