Pain au chocolat
Laminated croissant dough around two batons of chocolate, and the subject of a genuinely serious French regional naming dispute. The batons are a specific product, not chopped-up bar, and the difference is structural.
This is a current practice
A daily pastry across France and far beyond, made fresh in boulangeries every morning. The naming dispute described below is live and is conducted with more energy than an outsider would expect.
A pain au chocolat is made from the same laminated yeasted dough as a croissant — butter folded through dough in layers that separate into leaves as the water in the butter turns to steam — wrapped around two batons of chocolate and baked.
The batons are the part worth knowing about. They are a manufactured product, formulated to hold their shape through baking rather than to melt and run, in much the same way and for much the same reason a chocolate chip is. A pain au chocolat made with chopped eating chocolate produces a puddle that soaks into the dough and leaks out of the ends, which is a different and worse pastry.
Two batons rather than one, in the classic construction, so that a bite from anywhere along the pastry meets chocolate.
- Period
- France, nineteenth century onward
- Region
- France
- Kind of record
- Living practice
Who developed this
French, though the laminated viennoiserie tradition it belongs to arrived in France from Austria — which is what viennoiserie means, and which is why the croissant family sits in a slightly ambiguous national position.
Pain au chocolat or chocolatine
In most of France the pastry is a pain au chocolat. Across much of the south-west — Bordeaux, Toulouse and the surrounding region — it is a chocolatine, and the disagreement is a recognised regional marker rather than a joke, having reached the National Assembly on more than one occasion in the form of proposed amendments.
The etymology is disputed. One popular account derives chocolatine from an English "chocolate in bread" mangled by Gascon ears, which is the kind of story this catalogue's history section treats with suspicion — it is tidy, quotable and unsupported. A likelier derivation is simply the French diminutive suffix applied to chocolat, matching a pattern used for other pastries of the period.
Elsewhere the pastry has its own names again: couque au chocolat in parts of Belgium, and in Quebec chocolatine is the standard term.
Related
History and culture
- Chocolate chipsThe same formulation principle: a chocolate engineered to resist melting, for a product where melting is the problem.
- Best chocolate for cookiesThe general question of which chocolate survives an oven and in what form it should go in.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)