Harper's Kitchen: Dumplings!

[kniteracy]

Harper's Kitchen: Dumplings!

Last night, I roasted a chicken, a nice, reasonably sized one, stuffed with peppers and onions and basted with homemade teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion juice). I wanted a taste similar to the chicken rice I grew to love in Singapore, so I made rice not in salty water but in salty chicken stock with a pinch of coriander.

There are only three of us, and although the chicken was yummy, it was slightly undercooked, which meant quite a lot of meat left on the bone. And so of course, what do you do when you have a big honking chicken carcass, plus an extra leg quarter, left ovre after dinner? You put it in the chicken broth you cooked that rice in, yes you do, and you put it on the hob, in a covered pot with a teeny tiny steamhole, at a very low simmerboil -- all night. Oh yes.

It came off the boil this morning, and I've been wondering how to serve it up for dinner. There just isn't enough chicken for a stew, and G hates stews anyway. I don't really care for thin soups, but putting the leftover rice from last night into today's soup would feel like we were having the exact same dinner all over again. Usually, I put stewed tomatoes in chicken soup, but I don't have any, and ih. I'm not in the mood for stewed tomatoes.

But then it came to me. As I stirred the cooling pot and looked up onto the kitchen bookshelf for inspiration, a single word entered my head and Would Not Leave. Oh, it's a word that made me happy in childhood, and it still makes me happy today. Yes, yes, yes, in Harper's head was the word, and the word was

Dumplings!


We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes!

Right, so you UK people know, these are not those big cut dumplings you serve with beef stews over here. These will be drop dumplings, very simply made.

Before I get started on the dumplings, I'll cool down the broth and get rid of the chicken bones. My grandmother never used to do this in her chicken and dumplings; people just knew to work around the bones, but I think it's only fair to remove the bones and it doesn't take all that much time. There will still probably remain some bone bits in there, so if you're eating this, be careful!

Once I've got all the bones out, I'll add more chicken to the broth, because even though there was a decent amount of meat left over from last night, it's not enough to feed us all for dinner. I've got a package of chicken breasts in the tiny freezer bit of our fridge freezer, and I'll thaw that and add it to the broth. That broth will need to be renewed with a little bit of water and possibly a cube of chicken stock, and the new chicken will have to simmer in for a couple of hours. Some people take out the chicken before they put the dumplings in, but I don't usually do that.

Then it's time to make the dumplings. Now, these are good old fashioned Southern US dumplings, and I'm going to tell you how my grandmother made them and then how I'll have to change that recipe to work over here.

You need two cups of flour, a half-teaspoon of baking soda, a half teaspoon at least of salt, a few tablespoons of shortening, and at least half a cup of buttermilk.

Now, it's hard to get buttermilk and proper shortening over here, so I'm going to use butter and sweet milk*. Basically, you add the dry ingredients together, then cut in the butter or shortening until you have a coarse, grainy texture. Then, you stir in the milk until you have a not-too-runny doughy texture.

At this point, the soup itself should be boiling again. Pat the dough out 'til its about a quarter inch thick or so. Pinch off pieces of dough maybe as long as the length from fingertip to the first joint of your thumb, and drop them into the boiling water. Turn the heat down to a mediumish level and let the dumplings cook for 8-10 minutes. And then you have delicious chicken and dumplings!

Traditionally, chicken and dumplings is seasoned with an awful lot of black pepper. I'm not so much into black pepper, though I do put a little in. I like to season it with savoury herbs like sage or even oregano, adding the pepper only for taste. Then if people want seriously black pepper chicken and dumplings, they can pepper it up all they want at the table.

*Sweet milk is just what you call regular milk in a culture that uses a lot of buttermilk in cooking. My grandmother used more buttermilk than sweet milk when she cooked, so when she made a cake, she always had to make sure she had sweet milk on hand. I am pretty sure this construction is regional to the Southern US.

Comments

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

It's one of the best brands of pure vegetable shortening here in U.S. I knew she'd know what it was. :-)

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Yes, and there is *no* UK equivalent. Believe me, I've tried.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, have you tried White Flora? I've been able to use it for *some* of my Crisco-using recipes.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

I have tried Flora, but it didn't work all that well for me. fleetfootmike recommended something called Trex (http://www.pura.co.uk/speciality.asp) to me earlier today, and we'll be trying that as well.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I can't stand (normal) Flora, but White Flora has been useful to me for some of my baking (my banana bread recipe works well with it) and for things like roasting vegetables.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Which if course raises the question of what "shortening" may be, vegetable or otherwise. And eventually we may get down to answering how we've been baking for a few millennia without having ever heard of the stuff.

[aunty_marion]

Lard, marge, butter. Depends what one is making - lard for savoury, butter for sweet, marge if you don't have butter or lard will do for either. But preferably a hard one, not a 'spreadable' one.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Crisco is a very stiff shortening. I'll acquire some and show you sometime.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

This is why I'm learning to bake with butter, mostly. I don't tend to like margarines, and the proportions for butter are different. If you watch what you're doing, it's not hard to make the substitution, but US recipes that call for X shortening usually need X-something butter.

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry. I thought just the brand name was unfamiliar. It's a fat product made from vegetable oils, rather than animal, as lard is. Vegetable lard, I guess you could call it. Massively hydrogenated to be solid at room temperature. One can certainly bake without it, for millenia, even, but it sure comes in handy. Here, at least, it's cheaper than butter and can be purchased in large cans. Some lesser-quality brands combine animal and vegetable fats, but Crisco is one of the few brands I'm loyal to. It's essentially flavorless, so for some things it's more practical than butter. I have several cookie recipes that simply won't work with butter.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

A fat that you can store at room temperature without it going manky certainly sounds handy. And no, I don't think I've heard of anything like that here. Non-animal fats for baking generally means margarine.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

We'll see how I get on with Trex, (http://www.pura.co.uk/speciality.asp) and I'll be sure to write about it. ;)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"Shortening" is what makes pastry etc. 'short' -- basically, any fat. In most traditional UK cooking this was lard for savoury and butter for sweet, although I tend to use butter for everything. There are now vegetable lard and butter substitutes, although the quantities used tend to be different (margarine in particular often has a lot more water than butter). I know a number of people who prefer kosher lard if they can get it.

(As to how we've been baking, it's just another case of different words for the same thing...)

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

I certainly didn't mean to be offensive. I was commenting to telynor specifically, and I knew she would know what I meant because she learned how to cook in the U.S. Anyone who learned to cook or bake here would have some adjustments to make if shortening were not readily available.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think anybody was offended. At this point, there's about a 50/50 ratio of Brits and Americans who read and comment regularly here, so we often have fascinating terminology discussions here.

Me, I'm just curious as to why "short" pastry is called "short". :)

Hmmm. Interesting

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia: Shortening is a semisolid fat used in food preparation, especially baked goods, and is so called because it inhibits the formation of long gluten strands in wheat-based doughs, giving them a "short" texture (as in shortbread). Shortening can be made from animal fat (lard), but is more commonly a hydrogenated vegetable oil that is solid at room temperature. Shortening has a higher smoke point than butter and margarine, and it has 100% fat content, compared to 80% for butter and margarine. Crisco, a popular brand, was first produced in 1911.

I always assumed it's because it's a bread thing that does use the "long" method, with yeast.