Bubble Bread: or, Crispy dipping crackers

This recipe is for all you rolling pin lovers.

Bubble Bread 2 cups flour 1 tsp salt 2 tbsp melted butter Boiling water Heat oven to 375°. Have greased or parchment-lined baking sheets ready. Mix the flour and salt. Add the butter and a spoonful or two of boiling water. Mix in more boiling water until you have a stiff dough that you can easily shape in your hands but doesn't stick. Knead for about 30 seconds or until smooth ish. Roll out fairly thin, then cut into small squares. Then roll each one as thinly as possible. Bake until a light golden brown (about 15-20 minutes), rotating the pan about halfway through. (A lot of recipes don't care if your oven is a little uneven, but you definitely want to rotates the pan for this one.) "In the Kitchen;" The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 21 August 1933; page 1

Now that the temperatures have dropped, we can turn on the oven. I've cheated and used it a few times over the summer, but it still smelled like burning dust when I heated it up.

This is the first time I've seen "bake until bubbly" at the end of a non-casserole recipe.

For those outside of America, we have our own "bubble bread" which bears no resemblance to what they printed in Katanning. The American bubble bread involves slathering small pieces of bread dough (homemade or canned, depending on one's mood) in butter, cinnamon, and sugar. You then pile them into a tube pan and bake. When you serve it, everyone can break off pieces.  (I've also seen a savory variant with garlic and Parmesan.)

These days, getting everybody's bare hands all over the food seems like a quaint holdover from the pre-pandemic era. But if you can put microbes out of your mind, it's a fun edible centerpiece-- especially for kids. All of this is to say that the competing versions of bubble bread had me emailing more librarians in Australia before we were done with this recipe.

Getting to what is apparently the Australian version of bubble bread, the dough was almost suspiciously easy to mix together-- especially since we have an electric kettle to pour the boiling water from. Naturally, I couldn't plug it in without also making tea.

This dough rolled out more easily than I was prepared for. It was just elastic enough not to crumble or crack, but just firm enough to keep itself together instead of tearing apart. I got the feeling I could have gotten it as thin as tissue paper without borrowing language from hockey fans.

We're next supposed to cut it into pieces and roll each one again, which I took to mean that we should all of them as thin as possible, one at a time. And since I wasn't working with a massive dough sheet, it was easy (astonishingly easy!) to get this almost as thin as paper.

 

I had thought our dough would inflate into a sort of cut-budget copy of cream puffs (the recipe does say "when cooked it's all bubbly"), but it turned into something like crackers.

I guess it kind of looks bubbly...?

I didn't know if my bubble bread was correct. So, before deciding whether this was any good, I decided to once again send trans-hemispheric emails to whatever librarians in Australia might be willing to answer. I first wrote to the Katanning public library since I found this recipe in their newspaper and got no answer. After accepting that they would never reply, I sent a message to the city library in Adelaide because I hadn't emailed them over the beef dripping Depression cake. (I don't want to be a semiregular presence in the same library inboxes every time I get stuck in a recipe, even if this means I will eventually run out of cities.) Whoever replied suggested I contact the National Library of Australia before adding "From a personal point of view, as it doesn’t use yeast, it seems more like a flat bread, that has some bubbles in it when cooked. Probably good for things like yiros or dips."

Since emails don't require international postage, I went where I had been redirected. The librarian who answered started off with "Unfortunately, the National Library cannot comment on the accuracy of recipes published in items in our collection as this is beyond the service we offer. Since we are not a baking service, we cannot offer any instructions as to how these goods were supposed to come out, nor can we offer you any recipe improvements."

After that very final-sounding paragraph, the librarian had mercy on me. She went on to say "I can, however, show you a few ways you can research this recipe for yourself from overseas. You could compare your recipe and results with some of the other versions of this recipe published in digitised newspapers on Trove." [Note: Trove is the Australian newspaper archive that I've been getting all these Katanning newspapers on. Imagine newspapers.com without a paywall.]

I can't believe I didn't think to just look up the recipe myself and see what other people had to say! The librarian put in a series of links to various bubble bread recipes that she had found for me, including one with pictures and someone making bubble bread recently enough to post it on Facebook! Each of the recipes she sent differed from each other (as recipes for the same thing all tend to do), but they all produced little savory crackers like what we had made. Also, all of them had us rolling our dough "very very thin," or "to wafer thickness,"  or to "to paper thickness (this is important)."

One recipe got into more detail at the end, helpfully noting that "Bubble-bread is usually served in square pieces about four or five inches square. It should be allowed to bake until crisp and it should he a delicate pale brown in colour." Another recipe concluded with "If preferred, the squares can be left flat and the ends will then curl up slightly with the cooking," which is what happened with mine. It's nice to have my results corroborated. I can't guarantee that I made these right, but I think I got close.

So, I made these again, getting them very thin and raising the oven temperature a little bit. They came out a lot better. Imagine a wispier version of pita chips (or do Australians call them pita crisps?). Which, given the wince-inducing price of pita chips these days, I am more than happy to be able to do these myself. They felt a bit fragile, but proved sturdy enough for most dips. 

They were also nice with our recent fig pudding on them.

I also thought these would be very good if you added some other things to the dough. And indeed, some of the later-decade variants sent to me had things like Parmesan cheese or herbs mixed in, which was probably a lot more financially feasible after the Depression ended. 

In short, these are very good. But you do end up rolling each one out individually before baking. So if you make these, I hope you really love your rolling pin.