FryBoy
New member
My wife does the menu planning and most of the shopping; I cook. She got it in her head that she wanted Chicken & Dumplings, something neither of us had every made and probably had never even had (it's not exactly your typical SoCal fare, and we're both natives). So she picked a recipe from the Williams-Sonoma Chicken for Dinner cookbook (page 55), which like all the WS books has proved reliable in the past. Until last night.
The recipe calls for cooking a whole chicken with celery, carrots, bell pepper, onion, garlic, rutabaga, parsnip, bay, thyme, and salt & pepper in a Dutch oven with enough water to cover for about an hour. That part was quite good -- chicken was tender and very tasty.
The dumplings, however, were a total disaster. The recipe is simple enough (too simple, IMHO): sift 1 cup flour with ½ tablespoon baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt; cut in 3 tablespoons butter until consistency of coarse meal; add ¼ cup chopped Italian parsley; mix in ¼ cup milk with a fork until a firm dough forms; pinch off pieces of the dough and roll into 8 to 10 balls. The recipe then directs you to remove the cooked chicken from the pot, bring it back to a boil, put the dumplings into the boiling broth, and cover and cook until they "puff and the interiors are uniformly set, 10-15 minutes."
I followed the directions to the letter. I am very familiar with making dough, so I'm sure I did that part correctly. However, the dough balls pretty much dissolved into the boiling liquid, ruining the broth. Only about half of each dumpling remained intact, and although they did puff up, they were gooey and tasteless. Yuck! The would-be leftovers were dumped.
So, dumpling experts, what's wrong with this recipe? It is this the way they're supposed to be? If so, I'll have a matzo ball, please!
The recipe calls for cooking a whole chicken with celery, carrots, bell pepper, onion, garlic, rutabaga, parsnip, bay, thyme, and salt & pepper in a Dutch oven with enough water to cover for about an hour. That part was quite good -- chicken was tender and very tasty.
The dumplings, however, were a total disaster. The recipe is simple enough (too simple, IMHO): sift 1 cup flour with ½ tablespoon baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt; cut in 3 tablespoons butter until consistency of coarse meal; add ¼ cup chopped Italian parsley; mix in ¼ cup milk with a fork until a firm dough forms; pinch off pieces of the dough and roll into 8 to 10 balls. The recipe then directs you to remove the cooked chicken from the pot, bring it back to a boil, put the dumplings into the boiling broth, and cover and cook until they "puff and the interiors are uniformly set, 10-15 minutes."
I followed the directions to the letter. I am very familiar with making dough, so I'm sure I did that part correctly. However, the dough balls pretty much dissolved into the boiling liquid, ruining the broth. Only about half of each dumpling remained intact, and although they did puff up, they were gooey and tasteless. Yuck! The would-be leftovers were dumped.
So, dumpling experts, what's wrong with this recipe? It is this the way they're supposed to be? If so, I'll have a matzo ball, please!