Delaware · Main
Chicken and Slippery Dumplings
- Intermediate
- 2 h
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 1 whole chicken, about 1.6kg
- 2.5L water
- 2 onions, halved
- 3 celery ribs
- 2 carrots
- 2 bay leaves
- For the dumplings: 375g flour, 1 tsp salt, 55g lard or shortening, 180ml cold chicken broth
- Salt, pepper, and parsley
Equipment
Rolling pin
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveResting dough: the pause that does the work
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · celery
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the chicken with the vegetables and bay 75 min until tender. Lift out, pull the meat, and strain the broth back into the pot. 75 min
- Rub the lard into the flour and salt, then bind with just enough cold broth to make a stiff dough. Rest 20 min. 20 min
- Roll the dough very thin on a floured board and cut into 5cm squares.
- Bring the broth to a strong simmer and drop the squares in one at a time so they do not stick. Cook 15 min: they stay flat and slippery, never puffed. 15 min
- Return the chicken, season generously, and finish with parsley.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Resting dough: the pause that does the work 71 recipes
- It actually rested, covered, for the time stated, not cut short because the rest of the schedule was tight.
- It rolls and shapes without fighting: it stays where it is put, and it does not spring back or shrink on the bench between passes.
- The surface is smooth and supple rather than dry, cracked, or skinned over.
- It is at the temperature the next step needs: cold where the fat must stay solid, cool and relaxed where it must be rolled thin.
- Baked, it holds the dimensions it was shaped to rather than shrinking back from the edges of the tin or the rim of the dish.
Where it goes wrong The rest was skipped or shortened, so the gluten was still tight: the dough fought the pin and sprang back thick and uneven, then shrank down the sides of the tin in the oven.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir or Gamay
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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