Monday, January 28, 2013

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? 

11 comments:

  1. Baking my own bread is very high on my to-do list - I'm very impressed that you made this bread, and that it was a success!

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  2. Five loaves! That's insane... and awesome. I need to do more bread baking at home.

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  3. What an indulgent bread! That sounds really yummy.

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  4. looks so good even if the chips got burnt!

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  5. That looks awesome! I have to try it.

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  6. ha, that is a lot of bread :) love it. never tried anything like this, but it definitely sounds like a great way to start the day!

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  7. Still looks delicious - the white chocolate chips just look like regular chocolate on the outside! This recipe sounds wonderful...gotta try it!

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  8. A for effort - I wonder how they pulled off cooking the chips on the outside. It still sounds really tasty to me!

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  9. Made these today for my kids’ school parties tomorrow and WOW! So good! Going to keep some for the house for sure!

    Hyacinth
    Westlund Personal Injury Lawyers

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  10. I worked for club med in the pastry department. The chips are supposed to look that way on the outside there is no way of avoiding it. Great job, well done.

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