So I have this cyber pal named
Tammy (aka Tamdoll) and she's quite the baker. After following her blog for more than a year now, I had gotten ballsy enough to say, "Hey, Tammy! Let's make beautiful bread together." And guess what? She thought it was a fantastic idea.
I suggested the white chocolate bread that I fell in love with during my recent winter vacation at the
Sandpiper Bay Club Med in Port St. Lucie, Florida. If you've ever been to any of the Club Meds in the Dominican Republic or Mexico, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a baguette type loaf with white chocolate chips, the crust a bit caramelized bubbled over chips, and the inside surprisingly spongy and airy. I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When the host of the marketplace saw me leave with pieces precariously stuffed in a napkin, he drolly asked if I wanted the recipe. "Yes!" I barked at him with a bite of white chocolate bread still in my mouth. But what he gave me was the strangest collection of ingredients and measurements. I think it was made for an industrial baker, one who needed to output 50 loaves in an afternoon. I had no use for it so I chucked it in the trash, knowing that there was always Google to give me answers.
But the recipes I found were different, and the comments/ratings for each recipe rang with disappointment. I briefly wrote my pal Tammy a note about this mythical white chocolate bread and we decided to make it together based it on a recipe we found on
The Fresh Loaf website.
Or sort of together. She made it last week and her loaf looked amazing. She wrote on her
blog that she didn't use gluten flour. Now I made it yesterday and did use gluten flour, but I didn't have sour dough starter. Mine came out dense, but incredibly tasty. Though I will admit that maybe I should not have used an entire 10 ounce bag of white chocolate chips, that maybe half of the bag would have sufficed. And I followed the advice of a commenter named Christopher who suggested spritzing the loaf with water before baking it and also the preheat the oven with a pan of water in it.
Hmm. I'll try to make this again, but with sour dough starter. I really miss that spongy texture of the Club Med white chocolate bread.
I would hate to travel all the way to a Club Med just to have this delicious bread. But, hey, a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do to get herself some good white chocolate bread, right?
