The Baking Bible: White Chocolate Club Med Bread

I guess this is an actual thing at Club Med--guests get a loaf of chocolate bread and apparently the white chocolate is quite popular. I don't know who thought to add white chocolate chips or chunks to white bread, but by golly it is pretty damn good.

Rose's recipe uses her basic white sandwich loaf which is an easy and straightforward bread to make. It needs to knead for almost 10 minutes in the KitchenAid which made my machine dance across the counter--and got the child asking to turn it off only one minute into mixing.

I have to give props to this bread being a bit foolproof. After the initial rise and a degassing, the bread goes into the refrigerator to firm up for shaping--just 30 minutes to an hour. Well my bread hung out for three hours and almost doubled again. Yikes!

A portion of the dough is set aside, and the rest is rolled out to a rectangle and the white chocolate chunks are scattered over. This gets rolled up and then--smart more on Rose's part--the saved portion of dough gets rolled out and then wrapped around the chocolate-containing log. This is to contain the white chocolate so that it doesn't burn unattractively whilst baking.

As you can see from my photos I didn't pinch the seam well enough and the plain bread overcoat split open at the seams during the bake. Also, I seem to have not put the seam down at the bottom of the pan but rather somewhere on the side near the top. Oops! At least now you can see how the white chocolate burns, and how funky it would look if it were the whole loaf.

There are large holes in the bread where the white chocolate was, but maybe I didn't roll it up tight enough? Honestly it doesn't matter to any of us, as we like the bread as it. It is soft, and slightly sweet but not overly so (thanks to good quality white chocolate). It needs neither butter nor jam nor anything, not even a toasting. It just needs a nice cup of tea and permission to be devoured in 24 hours.