Chocolate Marbled Sourdough Spelt Bread

When I saw a picture of this bread, I couldn’t get it out of my head until I made it myself. After it was baked and cut, I kept looking at each slice admiring the patterns, and wondering how such simple ingredients can create something this beautiful. I adapted the recipe from this blog for chocolate wassant rolls, and made it into a naturally leavened bread. It is soft, and slices like regular sandwich loaf. It’s just a touch sweet, not like a dessert bread, and we’ve been eating it toasted with homemade butter, and even smothered it with peanut butter and orange jelly.

HOW TO MAKE CHOCOLATE MARBLED SOURDOUGH SPELT BREAD

Ingredients
Chocolate paste:
150g chocolate chips
2 large egg whites or 3 small (110g)
65g sugar
50g all-purpose spelt flour
20g blue corn flour, or 20g hazelnut flour
2 tablespoons whole milk
Leaven:
200g all-purpose spelt flour
2 tablespoons active sourdough starter
100 ml water
Dough:
240g all-purpose spelt flour
100g sugar
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 egg, beaten
60ml water
55g butter (1/2 stick), melted

Instructions
Make leaven:
Whisk starter with water until dissolved, add flour and mix; cover tightly and leave at room temperature for 5-8 hours, or until very bubbly.

Make chocolate paste:
Melt chocolate in small sauce pan.
Process the rest of ingredients in a mini food processor until smooth. Add to chocolate.
Stirring continuously, simmer mixture on low until it becomes a thick paste. Just a few minutes. Cool. It’s okay if it’s lumpy.
Flatten between two sheets of parchment paper, about 6×6 inches, and store in refrigerator.

Make dough:
Once leaven is active, combine all dough ingredients and knead with a machine or by hand to form a dough ball.
Let rest at room temp 2-3 hours, then transfer to refrigerator overnight, 10-12 hours. Alternatively, you can ferment at room temperature until the dough doubles in size, 4-5 hours: 

When ready to bake, bring dough to room temperature, knead to make a nice ball, and roll it out a couple of inches larger than the chocolate paste you made.
Put the sheet of chocolate paste in the middle of rolled dough and fold the edges of the dough.

Fold in half. Roll it out to original size. Fold again. Roll out again. Do it three or four times.

Cut the dough into three longitudinal pieces, braid, and tuck in the ends. Place the braid into a deep bread pan (I use 9x4x4′ Pullman pan from Sur La Table).

Allow to rest for an hour after shaping. Depending on how many times you folded the dough, it would look differently, although the layers never merge together:

Bake at 350ºF for 1 hour, covering with foil for the last 15-20 minutes to prevent burning the top.
Cool before slicing.