Wait… we are 20 some posts in and no recipes? I have very fond memories of my high school girl friend’s family’s chicken and noodles… very thick sauce (gravy) and thick noodles/dumplings (they did both) and if that wasn’t enough starch they served it over mashed potatoes.
I’ve tried making them a few times but they were never even close to as good. I’m a pretty good cook but I must be missing something.
Dumplings are more like the strip description, definitely not biscuit-like. A proper dumpling is about the thickness of an un-stuffed ravioli.
Dumplings are just flour and water with a pinch of salt. Add just enough water to allow you to work it into a dough and roll it out on a floured surface. Cut dumpling pieces and drop it into the simmering chicken broth to cook. Flour from the cooking dumplings will thicken the broth.
I’ve never heard of strip-like dumplings. I’ve always made them by dropping a flour/water/herb mixture by spoonfuls onto the top of the chicken soup. I’m actually making chicken and dumplings tomorrow.
1 cup all purpose flour. 1 egg. Multiply as needed; 2 is good for a smallish pot, 3 for a big one. You can always make more when you reheat the soup and they’re better fresh than reheated.
Fold egg(s) into flour. Add milk (at least 1%, skim doesn’t work as well) about a short cup at a time and blend. You want a thick, sticky batter that will barely flow when the bowl is tilted. Well-mixed but not obsessive about it; I think over-beating the mix is bad.
Bring soup, which should be a little on the thin side (not a thick gravy), to a low boil. Drop balls of the batter using a tablespoon and finger. Cover and simmer high for about 20 minutes. Dumplings will be puffier and floating on top of the soup. Stir them in and simmer another few minutes. Serve. Arm diners with sharp tools to fend off dumpling-pickers.
The whole bone in chicken version is effectively chicken fricasse rather than chicken and dumplings. It also has a slightly different flavor profile with a more herby leaning than salt and pepper [and occasionally a dab of capsaicin from something like a dash of tabasco sauce.]
Let me scrounge a recipe online for you. This lady is using an old Joy of Cooking recipe, modified to use boneless chicken instead of ‘chicken parts’.
We had a long discussion of this probably 10 years back on a medieval cooking discussion list and the original friquassee comes from le Viandier in the 1300s as number 23, chicken hotchpotch in this translation. Chicken livers [and even blood, in many recipes] were used as thickening agents in the ‘sauces’ created by the cooking liquids instead of a separately made sauce. Bashing the recipe to put it more into modern cooking terms - the chicken pieces are fried in lard, seasoned and then bread and livers are added and the whole simmered until the chicken is done. It comes out fairly dark instead of the blond creamy sauce we make it with today because of the use of chicken liver to thicken.
Does anybody add Vegeta to their chicken soup/stew? To me, it just doesn’t taste right if there isn’t Vegeta in it.
My mother (who’s now in her 80s) made the kind she had when growing up in during the depression in the 1930s - whole chicken boiled with carrots, potatoes, onion and celery (if they had that), and after the chicken was done and the gravy thickened, the flour-egg-and-milk dumplings where dropped on the simmering gravy by the rounded spoonful.
Another recipe she made a lot, again from the depression days, was “butter dumplings” as big fluffy balls (slightly flattened) in a cream sauce. They were very buttery (duh!) and made with lots of milk and cream. No chicken! She says that’s what they had because while they didn’t always have chicken or other meats, they always had milk and eggs from their small farm. I’ve never seen an “official” recipe from a cookbook for them, so I should get her to write it down.
We never had clear broth, because the flour from the outside of the dumplings would thicken the sauce, but non-blob dumplings? Sure. Biscuit dough with less leavening than normal, rolled out a bit thinner than you would for biscuits, cut in strips or squares, then slipped into the simmering broth. Soooo much nicer than the big giant blobs that are all squidgy on the outside and dry blobs of biscuit on the inside.
I prefer flat dumpings in a thick, creamy broth with the usual chicken soup vegetables. This mehtodist church down the street from my house growing up made chicken and dumplins like once a month. Very good.
My parents would attest to drop dumplings (probably made from bisquick) in the same thick, creamy broth. I never really cared for drop dumplings i gurss. In general, I prefer chicken and rice soup instead of dumplings or noodles.
Every cooking reference I’ve ever seen defines dumpling as a cooked ball of dough. Strips or squares are more like home made noodles, which can be quite yummy, but aren’t dumplings.
What my mom called chicken and dumplings she prepared in the electric skillet. It is supposedly the way her mom made them, in Pennsylvania Dutch country. She used bone-in chicken breasts and put the dumpling batter on top, so you would get a full piece of chicken with the same shape of biscuit attached on top. There wasn’t gravy, just basically drippings in the bottom that were enough to moisten the dumplings a little. Yum, yum.
My preference is fluffy balls (I make mine the same way I make a drop biscuit, but it goes into the broth instead of the oven) with a clear chicken-soup-like broth. The dumplings do automatically thicken the broth a little bit more than you’d get in standard soup, but I don’t like the stew/gravy texture that some people aim for. It just makes the entire dish heavy - I like the contrast between the thin broth and the thick dumpling.
I grew up on the noodle kind. Very thick noodles cooked in the broth with no veggies. Just chicken and noodles. This is always served over mashed potatoes.
We didn’t call it chicken and dumplings though. We called it chicken noodle soup but it was very much like described in the OP.
I saw that ep on tv over the weekend… it reminded me of the Chicken and Slicks that Cooks Country made
You are a genius. I’m stealing that. I usually just use a canned chicken noodle soup and some milk…
Not noodles, but not balls. They’re too doughy to be noodles. And the stock is never clear, even if it isn’t exactly creamy. It gets its color from some dense chicken broth (making in brown) and thickness from the starch, so it’s like a gravy.
I used to make my kids Chicken-n-Dumplings from the recipe on the Bisquick box. Quick, easy, but kinda ghetto. Early in our relationship, my gf wanted to impress my kids, so she made them her recipe for C-n-D which was freaking awesome; a real gourmet treat. Each dumpling was a small, tear-drop shaped affair, and she made the stock from scratch.
At one point I had to leave the table to take a call. My kids have always been very polite, and they thanked the cook and praised her cooking. But they also each suggested she ask me for my recipe, which was even better.
Nah–he’s great, but he’s been wrong occasionally. I can think of three times off the top of my head:
Spending an hour or so and $25/35 worth of parts to build a one-or-two shot smoker, when you could go to Home Depot and get a real one that’ll last decades for about $60.00
Trying to tell people that adding apple juice (!!! :eek: ) to beef stock somehow makes a veal stock equivilant for French Onion Soup. (Hint: it makes a horrible apple/beef/onion sweet/salty soup. Sort of gatorade-y in flavor)
Trying to convince people that noodles=dumplings. Dumplings are wads/spheres of dough, noodles are flat.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those. #1 showed the world how easy it is to make a smoker, you’re misremembering #2, and a lot of people make a flat dumpling. There are better examples of mediocre or bad advice from Good Eats.
'Round here, the flat style is most common, and it’s sometimes referred to as Chicken and pastry. And I think I know what’s for lunch!