Attempting Club Med's White Chocolate Bread

After spending a week at Club Med, I once again fell in love with their infamous White Chocolate Bread.  At the time I just assumed this would be too difficult to replicate at home.  However, after a bit of interent searching, I realized making this bread at home was not as far fetched as I originally thought.  Love and Olive Oil had attempted the White Chocolate Bread and seemed to have some good luck, so this was my attempt at bringing vacation home to Boston.

White Chocolate Bread

The Ingredients

The Necessities (adapted from Love and Olive Oil)

• 8 cups of bread flour
• 1 teaspoon active dry yeast (dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water to activate)
• 1 tablespoon wheat gluten
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 3 1/2 cups water
• 2 3/4 cups of white chocolate chips

Needless to say, this recipe produces a lot of bread - 5 loaves!  Also, the wheat gluten is somewhat of a specialty item.  Although the recipe only called for a teaspoon I had to buy a sizable bag.  I first mixed the flour, yeast and gluten in the bowl with the dough hook attachment and allowed it to stir together for about a minute.  I then added the water and mixed the dough for another 2 minutes.  Finally I added the salt and let the dough knead for an additional 9 minutes.  With all of these ingredients working at once, my new 7 quart mixer got quite a workout!

Mixing away...

Coming together

Next was time for the massive amount of white chocolate chips!

The Chips!

Slowly mixed in the chips for 2 minutes

Once fully mixed in, I took the dough out of the bowl, kneaded it a bit, then let the dough rest for about 15 minutes.

Resting

I divided the dough into 5 equal sections and kneaded the sections into long loaf forms.  I then covered the loaves and let them rest again for another 45 minutes.

Five Resting Loaves

Finally, I placed the loaves on parchment lined baking sheets and cooked them in a 450 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  

Bread!

I obviously had a bit of trouble with overcooking the chips on the outside of the bread!  The bread was tasty and did help me reminisce on the tropical weather!  Only thing is, I don't think I allowed the bread to knead enough since the end product was a bit dense and not nearly as light and airy as it should have been, especially when there was the wheat gluten in there, which is supposed to increase elasticity and improve the texture of the bread.  I feel like I was missing that here.  So, my only idea of what went wrong was kneading for too little amount of time.

However, dense or not, we still ate the bread!  It was especially delicious toasted with a bit of butter for breakfast in the days following :)

Any thoughts on how to fix a dense bread?