Chocolate Sandwich

No words can do this chocolate sandwich recipe justice. I will try, just the same.

I really loved the sound of the raspberry preserves and dark chocolate variation and the idea of using a panini press. Of course I don’t have a panini press, so I chose to enlist my trusty Belgian waffler. I cut my crusty French bread at a bit more than an inch, spread some butter on the outsides of the bread, coated the insides with the preserves, and laid 1 slice of the prepared bread on the hot waffle iron. I quickly added a few squares of Hershey’s special dark chocolate, topped it with the other slice of bread, and closed the waffle iron. After 3 minutes, I was confronted with an amazing toasty, waffle-y sandwich filled with raspberry and oozing dark chocolate. Truly a little bit of heaven from my trusty old waffle iron.

I ended up with a beautiful classic baguette just out of the oven and still warm. We cut the baguette straight across so the slices were not very large. For the first iteration, we tried it open-faced. For the second variation, we had the sandwich closed, which we preferred. We also felt that 2 ounces chocolate was excessive and did not make for a good balance between the bread and the chocolate.

While coarse sea salt is called for, make sure that your salt isn’t too coarse. We liked the little bursts of saltiness from the small chunks of coarse salt but didn’t care for the bigger chunks. Timingwise, we did 52 seconds on the first side and 36 seconds on the second.

We then tried a panini variation using 2 different flavor combinations: raspberry with dark chocolate and strawberry with milk chocolate. The purist in me had hoped that the original version was better or at least as good as the panini variation, but this was not the case. The panini were far superior—the texture of the sandwich was gentler with a more pleasant mouthfeel and didn’t have any of the hard edges of the toasted crusty bread. The panini version was so good that I even liked the milk chocolate sandwich (I’m not a milk chocolate fan).

This chocolate sandwich makes a very quick treat that you can whip up at the last minute. I imagine that this would be a fantastic dessert for a party.

You could dress it up with some ground dried lavender or fennel pollen for an extra “wow” factor! I used a cranberry walnut baguette, which was delicious, but I think a plain baguette would’ve let the olive oil shine more. I didn’t sandwich the slices of bread together because I wanted to taste more of the chocolate.

Given the choice between eating this toasted chocolate sandwich and a fresh pain au chocolat, the croissant is going to win every time. However, if you need a quick indulgence at home beyond just a square of chocolate, this isn’t a bad option. Obviously it would behoove you to use chocolate that you already fancy and a high-quality bread, and you should eat the sandwich while it’s still warm but not going to burn your taste buds off.

I didn’t try the variations, purely because I was interested in the mix of olive oil and chocolate (which turned out to be quite subtle), but I’d say you can’t go wrong with slathering other friends of chocolate on the bread. I couldn’t for the life of me find a whole French loaf, so I ended up with a baguette and made 2 mini sandwiches instead. I only used 1 1/8 ounces chocolate for the 4 slices, which was plenty. I used 72% Ghiradelli Intense Dark chocolate. It resulted in a crunchy, mouth-scraping experience, but that’s to be expected with crusty bread. Open-faced versus closed didn’t make a difference. I would’ve been happy with just the 1 smaller sandwich, though, and thought the yield was closer to 2 servings. As mentioned, I couldn’t really detect the olive oil—it may have made for a softer texture, but I’m not sure.