I Found the Wholegrain Pain au Chocolat Recipe

[BakerAunt]

Skeptic--I finally found that recipe for Pain au Chocolat that uses some whole wheat flour and does not require puff pastry. It is called Hazelnut Pain au Chocolat, and it appeared in the KAF Catalogue and in an email from KAF, which I printed 4/27/2007. It's 1/3 whole wheat and also calls for potato flour (or dried potato flakes). It has the option to substitute vanilla for the hazelnut flavoring. Other than that, you likely have the ingredients on hand.

If you goggle it, the recipe will come up at Pinterest. (I don't do Pinterest, so I didn't check.) In reading through the one I printed, part seems a bit more complicated than it needs to be--rolling each quarter into a rectangle, putting chocolate across the top, rolling it up, and then cutting them apart. I'd probably cut then before rolling them up.

If you want, and if it is ok with Mike, I can type the recipe into the recipe section. I'm planning to try baking it soon, as I have chocolate sticks in the refrigerator.

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[rottiedogs]

Mr Peabody to the rescue again - I found it in the wayback machine. Once you posted the exact name it came up for me. Link is below. I'm not a fan of hazelnut but the recipe says you can substitute vanilla for it so I think I would like to try this. Thanks for bringing it up. I sometimes forget how good some of the recipes from the catalog actually are. And how short lived they are. I don't understand why KAF takes them off the website so quickly.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170530064629/https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/new-hazelnut-pain-au-chocolat-recipe

[kimbob]

Rottiedogs, that is so cool!! I never heard of that site. Wow. Thanks for posting. New toy to play with! 😊

[BakerAunt]

Thank you, Rottiedogs! King Arthur should really consider creating a cookbook that is just the catalog/email recipes, or at least consider having a section on the website that includes them. I'm glad that I always printed any recipes that interested me; now if I could just get them all organized!

[chocomouse]

I've been spending some time recently cleaning out my study, and have several piles of recipes I've collected but not tried. I'm finding many that I clipped from KAF catalogues, and discovering I'm still interested. Sometimes I find the recipe posted on the KAF website, but most are so old they have been cleaned off the site. I have two right beside me now that I found a week ago, and I'm planning to type into my computerized recipe stash: Greek-Style Spinach-Cheese Pie and Spinach and Red Pepper Quiche. These two might come in handy if supplies of pork, chicken, beef dwindle - as long as we can get eggs, which have been missing from the shelves from time to time.

[skeptic7]

Thank you. Thank you. One of my next project is going to try to create my own au chocolat sticks. I think if I made an aluminum foil form with the right length and little dividers I can make it like one large chocolate bar that will break apart to the right size. If this is the recipe I remember it has two bars of chocolate per roll and they are like an S shape with a chocolate bar in each curve of the S.
I have so many recipes that I look at and think that this would be fun later. How do you organize your future recipe pile?

[Mike Nolan]

The Callebaut chocolate baking sticks that KAF sells (but is currently out of) are 3/8 by 1/4 x 3 inches. You can get polycarbonate chocolate molds around that size, I haven't seen any silicone molds that size yet. (Amazon comes up with 400 PAGES! of molds, I've looked through 25 so far. Note--some of these molds do not appear to be made of food-grade silicone.)

Followup and size correction: Persistence may have paid off, these are 0.4 x 0.4 x 4 inches in size, which would probably work for pain au chocolat.
chocolate stick molds

I'm not sure how well aluminum foil would work, but I think I could use metal rulers or pastry rolling wands to approximate that size then cut them to the right length. (I'd probably tape them in place on a baking sheet so it would be easy to use a scraper to get the tops flat and even.)

[BakerAunt]

Some further recipe sorting turned up two additional versions of this recipe.

The first--my copy from the email forgets to include the salt, but it has been corrected in the link that Rottiedogs posted, and so appeared later on the website (what I'm calling the second version).

The third version was called Whole Grain Pain au Chocolat. It was changed to include some products KAF was pushing at the time: Buttery Sweet Dough Flavoring (so no vanilla and no hazelnut); grape seed flour, and glazing sugar. Proportions also differ. Here is the ingredient list:

1 cup lukewarm water
3 Tbs. granulated sugar
4 Tbs. butter
2 tsp. Butter Sweet Dough flavor or vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups KAF unbleached flour
3/4 cup KAF organic whole wheat flour
3 Tbs. Baker's special dry milk
3 Tbs. potato flour (or 1/3 cup potato flakes)
3 Tbs. grape seed flour (optional for extra antioxidants)
1 1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. instant yeast.

It uses a topping of 2 Tbs. milk and 1/4 cup glazing sugar or confectioner's sugar.

The shaping is done in a different manner, and that shaping may be what Skeptic recalls:

First, it divides the dough in half, and works with each half in turn. Each half is shaped into an 8"x 9" rectangle, each of which is cut into a 4"x3" piece. Each piece is positioned with the 3" side facing the baker. A stick of chocolate is put on the dough about an inch from and parallel to the far edge. The far edge is then folded toward the baker, over the stick to the middle of the dough, and the edge is pressed lightly to seal. A second stick of chocolate is put on that seam. The rear short edge (away from you) is then folded over the second stick, and the seam pressed lightly. The second seam should be about an inch from the new top edge of the roll.

The roll is then flipped over, so seam side is down and put on the parchment-lined baking sheet. The recipe states that the chocolate sticks will not melt out, so there is no need to seal the outside edges of the dough.

So, the third version is designed to be open on the ends and glazed.

[Mike Nolan]

I ordered the mold I linked to upthread, and it is actually about 4 inches long (I updated the earlier post), which makes it much easier to use for making your own chocolate batons for pain au chocolat. Next time I create a pot of tempered chocolate, I'll make some of these.

[skeptic7]

Mike, Baker Aunt;
Thank you for finding the information for me! I'll try make Pan au chocolat soon, but I will probably have to improvise on the chocolate sticks. I'd like to try making my own molds and seeing how that works. If it doesn't work I'll just eat my mistakes. 🙂

[BakerAunt]

Skeptic--I'm actually baking these today, and the dough is on the first rise. I'll put the details on the baking thread. I have a LOT of the chocolate sticks, for some reason, and some are rather old, but the chocolate still smells fine, so I'm using 24 of them.

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