I got a hankering for chicken and dumplings and had never made them before. I considered looking up recipes, but figured it would be more fun to just make things up as I went along. So here are my results.
First I made a roux. I had seen several shows on the food network explaining different types of roux from white roux to brick roux. The only type of roux I had made before is a white roux for gravy or Mornay sauce for macaroni and cheese. So I thought I would try making a slightly darker roux for more flavor. I cooked 3 tablespoons of flour with 3 tablespoons of butter in a pan on low-medium heat until it got slightly brown.
To this I added 2 quarts of home-made chicken stock. Unfortunately, the roux I had made was not enough. I should have doubled or tripled it. So in order to compensate for the inadequate roux I made a slurry (water with arrowroot powder) and stirred that in until it was the thickness I wanted.
After this I threw in some pre-cooked chicken (leftover from something else), a couple bay leaves, fresh thyme, salt, and freshly ground pepper. For the dumplings, I used my regular biscuit dough and just pulled off little chunks of dough and threw them into the pot.
I cooked that for 15-20 minutes. Delicious.
UPDATE (9/17/2007): I have found that the dumpling dough has a thickening affect. There is no need to make sure the broth is the desired thickness before adding the dumplings. The second time I made this I did double the amount of roux, but the broth was still not the thickness I wanted. Since I was camping and didn’t have a lot of ingredients to work with I just let it go and added the dumplings. The broth thickened right up.
Hi Brian-
I’m curious why you use arrowroot powder instead of something like cornstarch in your “slurry”.
Cornstarch is a highly processed and refined product. When it is made most of the corn is discarded (or used for something else) and all that is left is starch. There is very little nutrition in that.
Arrowroot, OTOH, is simply the powdered form of a nutritious root vegetable. Nothing is taken away.
I realize this is an old blog post but my boyfriend had never heard of chicken and dumplings before, so I googled it and the photo that returned in the results looked SO DELICIOUS. reminded me of what my grandma used to make on cold days. I have Rocco Dispirito’s “now eat this” cook book which offers a low-calorie version of this dish I’m considering cooking this winter. I had also never heard of arrowroot until this post so now that is something I’ll consider versus cornstarch. Anyway thanks for the post!!