Name: Coffin Bread (Deep-Fried Toast Box with Creamy Chicken and Shrimp)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 2 servings
Cuisine: Taiwanese
Ingredients: 2 blocks white bread; 1 L oil for deep-frying; 25 g butter; 0.25 onion; 25 g plain flour; 200 ml milk; 100 ml chicken stock; 80 g chicken breast; 6 prawns; 30 g carrot; 20 g peas; 20 g sweetcorn; 0.5 tsp salt; 1 pinch white pepper

Ingredients

2servings

Bread
white bread · cut 4-5cm thick; day-old is better2 blocks
oil for deep-frying1 L
Filling
butter25 g
onion · finely chopped0.25
plain flour25 g
milk · cold200 ml
chicken stock100 ml
chicken breast · 1cm dice80 g
prawns · peeled and halved6
carrot · small dice30 g
peas20 g
sweetcorn20 g
salt0.5 tsp
white pepper1 pinch

Steps

Melt the butter in a pan and soften the onion for 3 minutes, then stir in the flour and cook 2 minutes more without colouring.
⏲ 5 min
Whisk in the cold milk and stock a little at a time, then simmer over low heat, stirring, for 5 minutes. It should be thick enough not to run straight off a tilted spoon — a sauce, not a soup.
⏲ 5 min
Add the chicken and carrot for 5 minutes, then the prawns, peas and corn for 2 minutes more. Season with salt and white pepper and keep hot over the lowest heat.
⏲ 7 min
Heat the oil to 170°C. Fry the bread blocks whole, turning, for 1-2 minutes until all six faces are golden. Stand them on a rack to drain.
⏲ 2 min
Cut three sides of the top crust about 1cm down and lift it like a lid. Press the crumb inside down with a spoon, or scoop a little out, to make the box.
Fill it to the top with the hot filling, set the lid on at an angle and serve at once. Eat the filling with a spoon from under the lid, and tear off the walls by hand.

Tips & Variations

Variations

With chicken liver: according to ko.wikipedia, when it was first sold in Tainan's Kangle market in the 1940s the main ingredient was chicken liver, then thought of as a luxury. A filling of sautéed chicken liver and mushrooms is close to the original.
Curry or corn chowder: shops now fill it with curry, creamed corn, seafood and more. Whatever the filling, the rule is the same — thickened with a roux.
Against the bread-bowl soup: clam chowder served in a sourdough bowl does not fry the bread, and its page says what follows: "The bread drinks the liquid, so make the chowder slightly thicker for it." Coffin bread does both — the filling is thick, and the bread is fried first.
The name: ko.wikipedia records that a professor, seeing the square box with its lid, said it looked like a coffin (棺材), and the name stuck.

Tips

Fry the block whole, and cut the lid afterwards. Menbosha tells you to stand its cut sides in the oil too, because "those faces are cut crumb and stay pale and damp otherwise." Coffin bread uses that property the other way round. All six outer faces are fried and sealed with oil, and the cut faces only appear afterwards, so they all end up inside the box. Cut first and fry, and the oil gets into the inside too and makes it heavy.
The oil temperature builds the wall. As menbosha puts it, "Below 150°C the bread drinks oil like a sponge and goes soggy;" a wall that has drunk oil is not a waterproof layer, it is an oil sponge. A short fry at 170°C dries only the outside.
Day-old bread is better. "Drier bread takes up less oil." What menbosha says holds here unchanged. Fresh bread lets the oil spread right through.
The filling is a sauce, not a soup. The fried wall only protects the outside; the inside of the box is unfried crumb, and a thin filling soaks straight into it. A roux-thick filling slows that down (thickening sauces).
Eat it at once. The crumb will drink the filling in the end, so the filling goes in just before eating. Left standing filled, only the lid stays crisp and the bottom turns to porridge.

The basics behind this dish

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