Bite-size pain au chocolat possible?

[Chris Hennes]

I had the impulse to make pain au chocolat this weekend, but I really have no use for a whole batch of them to eat myself. However, I could bring them to an event on Friday evening if I could come up with a way of making them tiny: maybe not necessarily single-bite-sized, but roughly the equivalent of a small cookie or so. A couple bites at most. Do you think this would be possible? Any suggestions for how to do it?

[avaserfi]

I staged at a restaurant that did a two bite rosemary croissant for bread service. I don't see why it couldn't be done with a chocolate filling. I'm fairly certain the smaller croissants were cooked at a higher temp than their larger counterparts. Otherwise, it was a pretty standard croissant recipe.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Absolutely possible, if you follow the technique that uses cool, melted chocolate in the last layer. Simply make smaller rolls, and bake in a hotter oven for less time to develop a good crust without dehydrating the insides. (I normally go 25 F over the oven temp for "regular" sized croissant or pan au chocolat).

If you're forming croissant around stick chocolate, it's much harder to miniaturize, but it can still be done (with much swearing).

[Chris Hennes]

I've only ever used batons, I don't know the melted chocolate technique: can you explain? Do you think I should roll the dough thinner than usual?

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Chris, first of all let me say that I'm assuming you're making pain au chocolat by first making croissant-style dough and then wrapping it around your baton. If you're using brioche-style dough, you should ignore me all together, because that's a completely different creature.

For the melted chocolate technique, you melt the chocolate (obviously) with a bit of butter to help keep it softer, then allow it to cool slowly to the consistency of warm butter (I couldn't tell you what temperature that was if I wanted to - I've always just done it by eyeballing it). Then on the last layer of your pastry, you spread it as you would the final butter layer of a croissant, fold the dough over the last time to seal it (as you would for a regular croissant), then cut and form the rolls immediately - you can't refrigerate the last layer, as it will become too stiff to roll properly.

I've been able to interleave up to 3 spreadings of chocolate without losing the loft that comes from the butter leafing, but for bite-size rolls I think that a single layer is probably more than sufficient. I would also experiment with rolling the dough as thinly as you can without rupturing it - that way you'll get more layers in the mini-rolls, which is always desireable (at least, for me it is. If I'm going through all the trouble to make pain au chocolat this way, I want them to be stupendously fantastic.)

ETA - if you're feeling very lazy, Nutella or similar would probably work wonderfully in this application.... Equally, you could do nut-butter filled breads in the same manner.

Edited July 2, 2012 by Panaderia Canadiense (log)

[Chris Hennes]

Interesting, I've never heard of doing PaC with layers of chocolate rather than batons (yes, I'm talking about the ones based on croissant dough, not brioche).

[JAZ]

I'm not very experienced with pain au chocolat, but I have used puff pastry squares in mini-muffin tins with other fillings, both sweet and savory. Maybe that would work.