French Chocolate

My lovely wife came home with some chocolate today.  When she told me I figured it would be a peanut slab but no she returned with 3.5lb's of imported Chocolate Batons from France.  I ask you dear reader, what does one do in a situation like this?  (Besides eat one right away!)  I pondered it a while before it dawned on me that the best course of action, actually the only course of action, was to make Pain au Chocolate.  Was this a hint from Chris?  We will never know, either way my Croissant plans for the day were derailed and I embarked on a new adventure ...

Making Pain au Chocolate starts in the same manner as Croissants, first you make a rich dough.  I used a 60% hydration dough (half milk, half water) with 10% (baker's percent) butter and Sugar added.  All the ingredients into the mixing bowl and ran it on low for about four minutes and then up one level for another two minutes.  The dough has low gluten development and is ready to go in the fridge.

Often I will let the dough bulk ferment at room temperature for an hour, I choose not to today as I was afraid I would forget, and that would be very very bad.  Also with the addition of chocolate the subtle nutty flavor the yeast imparts to the dough during the bulk ferment will be more or less lost.  So in the fridge it went!  Yes you are right, the books and blogs say to roll it out before putting it in the fridge.  I use to do that when I made smaller batches, but now that I am up to 1.8kg I just chuck the dough in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge for a few hours.

While the dough was in the fridge I beat the butter block into a sheet about 1/4" thick.  This is done by putting the butter between two pieces of parchment paper and wielding a rolling pin like a baseball bat.

I thought of boring you with pictures of rolling out the dough, putting in the butter - 425 grams of butter mind you - and rolling out the dough again, then folding the dough, then rolling out the dough, the folding the dough, and then rolling out the dough, and then folding the dough.   Fortunately for you I thought of it after I had done the same therefore I did not take any pictures so you are spared.  

The following picture is of the dough rolled out (it looks surprisingly similar to the other pictures I did not take) ready for the chocolate batons to be lovingly laid out. 

Did you notice in the above picture the big box of chocolate baton's my wife purchased?  Just in case here is a close up.  :)

Back to the point of this posting ... here is the dough with the batons laid out in nice neat rows ready for the rolling.

To the left is a long roll of Pain au Chocolate!  Instead of cutting the dough and then putting in the batons I roll up all the dough and then cut it to length.  It is much easier to cut that way and saves me the trouble of cleaning the pizza cutter.  I used my metal bench knife to cut dough and chocolate. 

Following are 11 Pain au Chocolate ready to proof or go into the freezer.  I will bake three of them tomorrow (Saturday) morning so the other eight will be saved for a rainy day - like Sunday!

As I put them into the freezer I did some math.  My target was 100g of layered dough in each Pain.  The weight of the dough was 1801, divide that by 11 and you have 163, almost twice the weight!  Sacre Bleu!!  :-)

Next time I have to cut it into 18 pieces.  I will do that by rolling it out slightly longer and using a smaller spacer. (The plastic bench knife in the above picture was my spacer.)   I still expect that, as overgrown as they may be, they will taste great.  

The rest of this post shall be in the morning when the first three come out of the oven ... I can't wait!  

I took a few of the pain au chocolate out of the freezer before I went to bed and put them in the fridge.  You will note that I cut one in half.  This was at the request of my wife who informed me that was not going to eat a whole one.  Dennis will get the other small one.  ;-)

About 3:00am they were taken out of the fridge and put on a baking sheet with some previously frozen croissants (picture on the left)  I am taking a guess on timing as one was frozen solid and the other is out of the fridge.  

Back to bed with dreams of croissants running through my head! (Sorry I just couldn't resist.)

When I got up at 8:00am in the morning I noticed the croissants had proofed nicely and the oven was on!  (I suspect that Chris turned on the oven.)

Once the oven was up to temp, about another five minutes, I put them in.  Now I bake my croissants at the highest oven temperature possible for 10 minutes under steam.  That means I put an inverted foil pan that has been sprayed with water over the croissants.  After the first 10 minutes I take the pan off and turn the oven down to 200c.  Set a timer for five minutes and go check the croissants, repeat.  Today it took another 12 minutes to produce the following.

Notice the butter leakage.  I am not overly pleased with it however one cannot be too upset given that they are almost 28% butter by weight when they go into the oven.  So coming out 27% butter they still are awesome.

The Pain au Chocolate went first and were enjoyed by all.  Following are some pictures for your viewing pleasure!

Final Ingredient List:

Bread Flour 750g
Salt 19g
Sugar 75g
Yeast 15g
Butter 75g (soft)
Water 214g
Milk 214g
Butter 425g (sheeted for rolling)
Total weight 1801g

50 chocolate batons (48 for the dough 2 for the baker)

I am submitting this post to yeast spotting.