Bread used for containing soup

Question

So when I was away on holiday we had a lovely lovely meal which was basically soup. But the soup was served in bread which you could then eat aswell. It was so tasty, the bread was essentially hollow with only the crust but there was a little bit of the dough stuff left which became lovely and gooey from the liquid of the soup.

So as I am a great soup eater (and my boyfriend even more so) this is something that we are really looking to try and do... Can anyone suggest the best way to do this - do I just bake a loaf of bread and then scoop out the insides, or is the some kind of clever way of making the bread hollow so that essentially I am making the crust?

Hope that someone can help as this is something that I would love to serve at a dinner party!

Thanks :)

Answer 1

When we were kids my mum used to do this for us, but always with bought rolls. Basically she would buy crusty rolls from the bakery. Usually these would have been cooked in batches and so where they were joined to another roll there would be a bit which was not crusty. she would scoop out the bread from these points and then just pour soup into the roll. We would drink the soup from the roll, then at the end eat the whole thing. Delicious.

On the idea of making bread which was all crust, I wonder if you could do this by rolling your bread out flat, like a small pizza, then getting a potato and cutting one end flat, so it can stand on the flat end. Then wrap the bread around the potato, leaving the cut end uncovered. put it in the oven stood on the flat end and when it cooks you should get a bowl shaped bread roll that you could fill with soup.

The potato might affect the cooking of the bread though, so might not be appropriate, but a stone (hard to stand up) or half brick (square, but might work) might work better.

Not sure if having the bread around the stone will affect its cooking too much, it might be a case of try it and see. You also might not get the desired effect if the inside has a crust as well as the soup might not soak into the bread as well.

This answer will help getting the rolls to be nice and crusty I think.

Answer 2

You don't need to worry about trying to bake hollow bread.

The typical way of doing this is to bake a stout, crusty French bread into a boule. You can use commercial yeast, but I recommend sourdough if you can.

Once baked, and cooled, you just cut a circular hole in the top of the boule and remove a big chunk. The larger the hole, the larger the portion of soup. If you were to actually hollow this out, you'd end up with a rather huge portion of soup. The finished product should end up looking exactly like those shown in this blog post.

Answer 3

This is very similar to the South African dish Bunny Chow which I believe is just made in a normal loaf of bread, hollowed out. The Bread that is taken out is served as well for dunking into the curry.

Answer 4

It's typically a round loaf of bread, with a firm crust, a hole cut in the top and hollowed out. (save the insides for bread crumbs ... you can freeze them if you're not going to use them right away).

You can find recipies online by searching for the term "bread bowl recipe".

Answer 5

We had bread bowls at the coffee shop I used to work at for the stew as the soup was too runny. I never tried it but we always ran out of bread bowls. :) We just had a giant 'bun' that you cut the top off and then scooped the inside out. If you were hungry enough you could always dip that inside bread in the soup.