“We started the kneading of the traditional baguette,” explains Michel Rokita, head of the Credo bakery, showing a huge mechanical arm kneading the dough.
It is with this preparation that we will make our pain au chocolat.
And he adds: “It's really the dough that is used to make baguettes.
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His employee Kendji extracts a piece of dough from the tank and mixes it with cocoa powder, sugar and chocolate chips.
The dough turns brown.
It is proofed in the proofing chamber, shaped into balls and then into rolls before being placed in the deck oven.
A few minutes later, small, plump, dark brown chopsticks come out.
“We are not at all dealing with the same process as a pastry, remarks Michel Rokita.
That's a real pain au chocolat because it's made with bread dough.
It would be common sense to give it that name!
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Once displayed, his product is nevertheless called “cocoa bread”… “It's to avoid confusion between pain au chocolat and chocolatine”, explains the artisan.
A precision: the Credo bakery is located in Toulouse, in the kingdom of chocolatine.
A region where, according to the recurring jokes on social networks for 10 or 15 years, referring to the famous chocolate viennoiserie as "pain au chocolat" is a taboo.
“A chocolatine is made with puff pastry but never with bread dough,” adds Michel Rokita.
It maps the pain au chocolat and chocolatine areas
But then should we say “pain au chocolat” or “chocolatine”?
The reality is much more complex than the internet.
"There are areas in the north and east of France where the terms 'petit pain' or 'petit pain au chocolat' are used," explains linguist Mathieu Avanzi, lecturer at the Sorbonne, who has mapped the designations of the much-discussed viennoiserie (Atlas of the French of our regions, ed. Armand Colin).
In a very small part of Belgium, the word “chocolate couque” is even used.
However, oddly, there is no debate on these syntagms!
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We continue reading his map of France: “On most of the French territory, we speak of “pain au chocolat”.
"Chocolatine" belongs to a large southwestern quarter.
This does not prevent certain bakery chains from using the term "pain au chocolat", even if it is in the minority.
This is the case, in Toulouse, of the shops of La Brioche Dorée.
When we ask the saleswoman why the label says “pain au chocolat”, she replies that the bakery is headquartered in Brittany… where that is the current term.
Toulouse residents will appreciate it!
From a historical point of view, on the other hand, "pain au chocolat" appears for the first time in a bakery context in 1930, in the weekly Candide and "chocolatine" in 1963 in the newspaper Sud-Ouest.
But in neither of the two cases can we establish with certainty that the term really designates a viennoiserie with puff pastry.
In order to get everyone to agree and calm the debate, Mathieu Avanzi invokes the “right of the soil”: you have to borrow the term in force from your host region.
In other words: in Paris, do as the Parisians do and say “pain au chocolat”;
and in Toulouse do as the people of Toulouse say “chocolatine”!