What Is Kataifi? The Shredded Pastry in Kunafa and Dubai Chocolate

Kataifi is a pastry made of thin, pale strands that look like uncooked vermicelli. A runny batter of wheat flour and water drips through fine holes onto a hot, turning metal plate. It sets into threads within one turn and is swept off. Bake or fry those threads in butter and they turn gold and crisp. That crunch is the whole reason the pastry exists, in a tray of kunafa or inside a Dubai chocolate bar.

Turkey's national standard for the pastry, TS 10344, defines it with two ingredients: sifted wheat flour and drinking water. We read the labels on 22 packs sold in eight countries to see how close the shop versions stay to that. The roasted packs mostly do. The frozen doughs mostly do not, and one American dough lists 12 ingredients.

How is kataifi made?

The Turkish standard, as quoted in the Ministry of National Education's teaching module on kadayıf, calls it a semi-finished product made by pouring and cooking a runny dough of sifted wheat flour and drinking water, and frying it when needed. The same module says the only raw materials are flour and water, and that the flour should be low in protein.

The method has not changed much. Water and flour are mixed in a machine until the batter runs at the right speed, then left to rest. The batter passes through a hopper with fine holes and falls onto a round tray heated from below, listed in the module's process chart at 200°C. After one turn a brush sweeps the strands onto a belt, and a worker gathers them into equal bundles. The strands rest on racks to let the steam out, then get weighed and packed.

The module also names the two forms it is sold in, unfried and fried. Shops outside Turkey use the same split. Soft kataifi comes chilled or frozen and you cook it yourself. Dried and pre-roasted kataifi comes in a bag on the shelf, and it is the form the Dubai chocolate trend made common.

Is kataifi the same as filo pastry?

No, although the packs say otherwise. Seven of the 22 products in our table carry "shredded fillo" or "shredded phyllo" in their name, among them Athens, Apollo and Ziyad.

The Australian maker Antoniou, which makes both, puts it plainly: "Kataifi Pastry is a completely different product. Kataifi Pastry starts out as a batter which is poured through fine spouts onto a heated metal plate, where it is briefly dried and cooked. Whereas Fillo Pastry begins as a dough that is stretched, heated and rolled out into fine sheets."

So you cannot make kataifi by slicing a stack of filo sheets. Chopped filo will crisp in butter, and it will taste close, but it bakes into flakes where kataifi bakes into threads.

Kataifi, kadayif, knafeh: are they different things?

They are one pastry under several names. It is kataifi or kantaifi in Greek, kadayıf in Turkish, kadaif across much of the Balkans, and Engelshaar, angel hair, in German. The Turkish word comes from the Arabic plural qaṭāʾif.

The confusing one is knafeh, or kunafa. In Arabic usage that is the name of the finished dessert, and in shops it is also the name on the pastry. Tasting Table's guide to the dessert notes the pastry "goes by names like kataifi, kadaif, kadayifi, or, confusingly, even by knafeh or kunafa." If a recipe asks for kunafa dough, buy kataifi.

The strands have a long history in Turkish sweets. The ministry module traces kadayıf back to the Seljuk period. It also notes that the Ottoman cookbook Melceü't-Tabbâhîn describes eleven kinds, among them tel kadayıf, the strand pastry this page is about, and ekmek kadayıfı, a syrup-soaked bread that shares only the name.

What is in a pack of kataifi?

We read the ingredients list on 22 kataifi products sold in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Greece and Turkey, on 18 September 2026. Twelve are soft doughs, sold frozen, fresh, or with no format stated. Eight are dried or roasted. Two are gluten-free. The table gives each list in short English. The full dataset has every list verbatim in its original language, with the source for each row, under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Two different products sit under the one name.

The roasted bags are close to the standard. Five of the eight dried or roasted packs list flour, water and at most salt. Two add preservatives, and one, Sous Chef's, adds corn starch and sunflower oil. Two of these packs, Eastanbul's and Country Kitchen's, list flour and water and nothing else, which is the Turkish definition word for word.

The soft doughs are not. All twelve list a starch on top of the flour: corn starch, modified food starch, wheat starch or wheaten cornflour. Ten of the eleven with a single consistent list add oil, nine add a preservative, and five add a sugar, as dextrose or maltodextrin. The Athens Foods dough, made in Ohio, runs to 12 entries even with its three preservatives counted as one. On the Athens, Apollo and Antoniou packs, water comes first, which means it is the heaviest single ingredient.

The extras do a job. Starch and oil keep soft strands pliable and stop them sticking into a mat, and the preservatives let a damp dough sit in a freezer case. A dry, roasted strand has had its water driven off and needs less help. That reading is ours, not something the labels state, but it fits the pattern in every row.

How much fat and energy is in kataifi?

Four products publish a full panel per 100 g, and three of them are the dried or roasted kind.

The number to take from this is the fat. Retail roasted kataifi carries 1.5 g or less per 100 g, so it is dry-roasted dough and not the butter-fried strands of a home recipe. If you buy the roasted bag for a Dubai chocolate filling, the richness still has to come from what you mix in: the butter, and the pistachio cream or pistachio paste.

Look at the Özyil and Morgiana rows side by side. Both are roasted kadayif made in Turkey, sold under different names in Germany and the US, and the two panels match on energy, fat, carbohydrate, protein and salt. Only sugars differ, 0 g against 1 g. The ingredients match too. We could not confirm a shared manufacturer, so we draw no conclusion beyond the figures.

Soft, dried or roasted: which kataifi do you need?

Use soft kataifi for anything you bake: kunafa, nut-filled rolls, nests, a crust for fish or prawns. It needs butter worked through every strand and time in the oven. Our pistachio kunafa uses 400 g of it with 200 g of melted butter.

Use roasted kataifi when the strands only need to add crunch to something that never goes in the oven, which is the Dubai chocolate filling. It saves the toasting step. You can also toast soft kataifi yourself, and our Dubai chocolate recipe does that: 150 g of kataifi toasted in 20 g of butter until deep gold.

Soft kataifi dries out fast once it meets the air. Athens Foods says to thaw the pack unopened in the refrigerator overnight. Once it is open, cover it completely with plastic wrap, then a damp towel. Unused kataifi goes back in its bag, sealed tight, and back in the freezer for up to two months. Antoniou says to let the pack reach room temperature before you open it, at least two hours for chilled kataifi and four for frozen.

Is kataifi gluten-free or vegan?

Standard kataifi is made from wheat and contains gluten. Athens and Apollo add vital wheat gluten as well. We found two gluten-free versions, both Turkish and sold as glutensiz tel kadayıf: one made from corn and rice flour, the other from an unnamed gluten-free flour.

The pastry itself is usually vegan. None of the 22 lists we read contains egg or milk, and Antoniou states its kataifi is suitable for vegans. The desserts made with it usually are not. Kunafa takes butter and cheese, and a Dubai chocolate bar takes milk chocolate. Two of the US doughs also contain soy lecithin, which matters if you avoid soy.

Why did kataifi become hard to find?

Because Dubai chocolate needs it, and the bar went from one Dubai shop to a global category in about two years. Our Dubai chocolate history has the dated record. Four reports trace what that did to the pastry.

In April 2025 Charles Jandreau, general manager of the UK chocolate group Prestat, told the Financial Times, as reported by Asharq Al-Awsat, "No one's ready for this," describing his struggle to buy kataifi. In October 2025 Cleveland 19 reported that kataifi production at Athens Foods in Brook Park, Ohio had grown 76% in a year, over 70,000 more cases. In January 2026 Korea JoongAng Daily reported that South Korea imported 785 tons of Turkish dried noodles containing kataifi in the first twelve days of the year, up 168.8% on 292 tons a year earlier. And in February 2026 Turkey's grain and pulses exporters' association told Hürriyet that kadayıf exports rose 40% in 2025, to $145 million.

The same demand fell on the other key ingredient. Our pistachio price tracker shows what pistachios cost through the boom, and our label audit of how much pistachio is in Dubai chocolate found kadayif at 1.3% to 7% of the bar where a label measures it against the whole bar. A small share of each bar, multiplied by a very large number of bars.

What can you use instead of kataifi?

Nothing gives you the same thread, but you can get the crunch. For a Dubai chocolate filling, Tasting Table suggests Rice Krispies or corn flakes, and points out that toasted shredded coconut is a swap that happens to be gluten-free. For kunafa there is no good substitute, because the dessert is the pastry. Chopped filo sheets, crisped in butter, come closest.

How we read the labels

We included any product sold as kataifi, kadayif, kadaif, kunafa dough or shredded fillo dough where we could read a full ingredients list on a page we can link. Fifteen rows come from retailer listings, five from brand websites and two from Open Food Facts, a crowd-sourced label database. Three brands printed different lists in different places: Kontos, Theos and Alkis. For Kontos and Alkis we used the brand's own site and recorded the retailer's version in the dataset. For Theos, three UK retailers print three lists and we could find no brand page, so its preservative, oil and sugar cells are marked disputed.

We left out one Eastanbul product whose only list was marketing copy, and several products whose listings were blocked to automated reading or published nutrition with no ingredients. Supermarket own-brand kataifi from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi and Coles did not turn up at all.

Two nutrition panels were dropped. The Suntat record gives 288 kcal against 1529 kJ, which do not agree. The two Open Food Facts records for Kanaki disagree with each other, 298 kcal against 130 kcal per 100 g. Neither made the panel table. We did not convert per-serving panels to per-100 g figures, because US panels round each value and the conversion would carry that rounding.

We did not test or weigh anything. This page reports what makers and retailers print, which can differ from what is in the pack, and labels change. If you make one of these products and a row is out of date, tell us through the about page and we will correct it and log the change below.

Citing this audit

You are welcome to cite or reproduce the tables and the dataset, including for commercial publication, with attribution to pistachiomilk.org and a link to this page (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0). A suggested citation:

Ricci, E. (2026). What Is Kataifi? The Shredded Pastry in Kunafa and Dubai Chocolate. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/kataifi/

Version history: v1.0, published 18 September 2026. 22 products, labels as read on that date. Corrections and additions will be listed here.

Allergy note

Kataifi contains wheat and gluten, and some doughs contain soy. The dishes it goes into usually add tree nuts, most often pistachios, plus milk. Pistachio is a tree nut, so check every label if you cook for someone with a nut allergy, and read our page on whether pistachios are a tree nut for the detail.