Pain au Chocolat

Elena Butuc

After the success I had with the homemade croissants recipe, I find it only logical to go further and try out all their 'friends' - pain au chocolat, pain au raisins, chausson aux pommes (coming next) etc. They are all fantastic and I am glad I had enough luck and opportunities to taste them in Paris. Really, they are worth every minute of effort invested in making them. They are so special, each one with their different filling, but with the same softness and flavour of the butter pastry dough.

It's a moment of great joy in our house whenever I test a recipe from this category. Pain au chocolat has become my husband's and my girls' favourite and I'm a big fan of pain au raisins.

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Ingredients

Metric US

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Croissant dough

1 piece

you can find the recipe on my website

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Dark chocolate

80 g

whichever taste you like

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Egg whites

1 piece

Step by step

First you need to make the croissant pastry - it's a puff pastry, but it contains yeast. You can find the recipe on my website.

I like to make it the day before or even sooner and I keep it in the fridge or the freezer (if it's more than 2-3 days).

Before starting shaping the pains au chocolat, cut the chocolate bar into thin 5-6 mm slices.

Take the pastry dough from the fridge, flour the table and roll the dough out using a rolling pin.

First, place the rectangle with the long side facing you (like a book standing vertically) and roll out carefully until the lenght is about 24-25 cm. This is going to be the lenght of the rectangle.

Then rotate so that you face the width of the rectangle, like a book sitting horizontally or like a landscape view.

Roll the dough out with the rolling pin until width is about 40-42 cm.

At the end, you should have a 24x40 cm rectangle.

Measure, with a ruler or simply with the eye, 10 rectangles of about 8x12 cm, cut them with a knife.

Arrange the pieces of chocolate across the short ends of each rectangle.

Fold one of the sides over the chocolate, toward the center.

Repeat on the opposite side.

Do the same to finish all the pains au chocolat and place, seam side down, on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Cover them with plastic wrap and allow them to rise for 2 hours at room temperature.

Make sure you preheat the oven to 200 degrees C, so you should probably turn it on after an hour and a half since the pains have been rising.

Before baking, brush the pains of chocolat with raw egg white.

Bake in the preheated oven to 200 degrees C for 15 minutes, then bake for another 5-10 minutes to 180 degrees C. Time may vary a bit, depending on each oven, so just make the necessary adjustments.

If you bake the rolls in the oven which has not been preheated to 200 degrees C, the butter will drain from the pastry and the rolls will get very oily and will collapse.