How to Make Granny's Chicken and Dumplings - Heirloom Recipe - The Hillbilly Kitchen

howdy folks and welcome to the hillbilly kitchen today we're going to be making chicken and dumplings with drop dumplings now I said drop dumplings because they are different than the rolled out kind of dumplings that a lot of people do nowadays drop dumplings are what my granny made so we're going to do that older version or maybe it's not older I don't know but it's the version that came from this part of the country and the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to take a half stick of butter which is about a quarter of a cup and I'm going to turn my pot on medium heat and get it preheating now when my granny made these she would put a whole chicken in a pot and stew it well there's a little bit of difference nowadays in the chicken that you can buy in a store and a chicken that my granny raised it just does not taste the same and I think if you just throw chicken in a pot that you go to the grocery store and buy when you're done your chickens not going to have any flavor and your dumplings are not going to have any flavor so I have to season mine a little bit to get a really good pot of chicken and dumplings and if you've watched my other videos you know that all of my chicken gets a little honey a little lemon juice and onion either chopped onion or onion powder or something like that but in this we're using a whole chopped onion because it will give the broth a lot of extra flavor and that's what we're looking for because we do have store-bought chicken not a fresh farm raised chicken now you don't want to get carried away with the lemon juice in the honey and it is kind of to taste I just use about a tablespoon of each just to give it a little bit of flavor maybe a little bit more but not much and for my chicken I prefer white meat so I have about eight chicken tenders here that I'm going to use that's a little over a pound but you have to have some chicken fat to get that flavor in your stock so that your dumplings taste good so I use three chicken thighs they are mostly fat and they have the bone in them which also gives you a lot of flavor and in your chicken you're also going to put salt and pepper and again that's to taste now for our dumplings we have a cup and a half of all-purpose flour we have a heaping tablespoon of baking powder now you can use um self-rising flour and if you do I would add about a teaspoon of baking powder to that because you want to make sure these really rise good and I've got a half a teaspoon of salt I'm using this because I have been informed that you can't get self-rising flour everywhere if you do self-rising it's the same cup and a half and just add just a little baking powder to it and we are going to sift that because we do want them to be fluffy and I don't have a sifter but you can get these little metal strainers everywhere and they're pretty cheap and they work alright for a sifter and we need 3/4 of a cup of milk so we're going to get our chicken in here as soon as this pan is preheated and we'll season it and we're going to cook it until it's starting to brown and then we're going to add our water and let it simmer for a little while to get the rest of the flavor out so that our broth is flavored and our dumplings will be flavored okay that's preheated pretty good you really don't want to put your meat in a cold pan ever and I'm going to put my chicken tenders in the bottom because like I said I do want them to brown a little bit in that butter it gives them more flavor and I'm actually going to season them before I even throw my thighs in take your lemon juice and there is a little bit of it over top and like I said it's to taste don't get carried away drizzle your honey over and if you get too much honey your chicken really won't taste right it'll be too sweet and that's not good but I think without the honey that chicken almost has a bitter taste now we're not adding any can stock or can soup or anything like that to this because that stuff all has additives in it has msg in it it's loaded a lot of people comment on this show and they're worried about sodium but that stuff is just loaded with it and a single can of condensed soup you would have way more sodium than what we're putting in this whole recipe okay now we're just going to lay our flies in there and we're gonna let this sit there like I said and cook until the chicken is cooked and it starts to brown and we'll be back in a little while and check on it so this is the reason why I'm making chicken and dumplings today because my favorite little dumpling leader is visiting and Charlotte absolutely loves chicken and dumplings Charlotte is the reason why I don't put anything artificial in my chicken and dumplings no king soups or broths or anything like that to have MSG's in them because she loves chicken and dumplings and I would not want to feed her that stuff but you can see here that our chicken is kind of browning a little bit you're not going to get it super brown unless you cook all the juice out of it and we don't want to cook all the juice out of it because we want that flavor in our raw that piece tears really round but it's round enough now that it's going to have a good flavor to it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add about 3 cups of water to this now if you want to make a whole bunch of broth for your dumplings you can add more but I wouldn't get carried away not with this much and I think three cups is probably about all that shit's much chicken more seasoned so we're just going to add the water to our broth or dirt well to our chicken that'll make the broth and we're going to cover this and we're going to let it sit here and simmer for maybe 20 minutes or so and you could even add a little more salt and pepper to it you can add a little parsley or something like that to it and a lot of people add vegetables to it but that's not really chicken and dumplings I mean chicken and dumplings are just a chicken and a broth that thickens a little bit with the dumplings in a dumpling so while I'm waiting on that to simmer and Charlotte's mixing over here in her Cup I am going to see if my flour just a little bit and I said I have a flour sifter but these little um bi-metal strainers they work just fine and you can get these cheap you just pour your flour in there and it'll make your dumplings um fluffier and you catch it a little and that makes it go through this screen and the screens on these are exactly like the screens on a strainer and this is just our flour and our baking soda and our salt that we put together and I'm not going to add the milk to it until this simmers for a few minutes and I'm actually ready to drop my dumplings into the broth we'll be back in just a few minutes when our office simmered like I said for about 20 minutes or so you can let it simmer longer my granny would probably simmer her chicken for a couple of hours but she didn't do the frying before like I did okay our chicken has been simmering for about 15-20 minutes now and we're going to just pour our milk into our flour and salt and baking powder that we sifted and stirred up and what that Simran does is it gets all the fat out of that those chicken thighs and it finishes getting the flavor out of the onions they were pretty well cooked but it gets the flavor out of them and it gets some flavor out of the marrow in the bones and the chicken thighs that we put in there okay these are pretty well mixed up now what we're going to do is we're going to take and scoop all of our chicken out of our pan and if you have time you can certainly script those chicken thighs and take the meat off of those and add to it but we're definitely going to break up our chicken breasts a little bit if you don't have time to strip the meat off those chicken thighs there it's cheaper to put those in there than it is a can of broth and I'm certainly healthier because like I said you don't have all the additives the MSG's and stuff and pretty much all can broth have that stuff in it so they're good treat for the puppies if you don't have time to put them in there because you have a little helper okay now we're going to take a spoon and dip it in the hot broth and then scoop us out a dumpling and drop it in there now you want to do this pretty fast and if you dip your spoon in your hot grease or in your hot broth every time it keeps the dumplings from sticking to the spoon saw there I missed it one time and my little dumpling stuck but just everytime kind of dip your spoon down in there when you dump your dumpling in and these don't need to be regular shaped up oh did you drop it and you don't need to worry about making them pretty or anything like that and we will do a video sometime with the roll dumplings because Charlotte likes both kind but when my granny made them she made these drop dumplings and she would do them in fruit like the apple dumplings and she's doing with blackberries and blueberries and peaches and all kind of stuff and this is the only kind she ever made you don't really need to worry about thickening this either because the dumpling is actually seeking the gravy as they cook in it and if you're going to have any of this for leftovers you definitely don't want thicken it because the longer it sits the thicker it gets now we're going to put the lid on this and we're going to turn our timer on for 12 minutes and just leave it completely covered don't take your cover off for 12 minutes and in 12 minutes you're done should be done now while your dumplings are cooking you want to kind of tear up your chicken a little bit okay our dumplings have been simmering for about 12 minutes now so we're going to turn the time or turn the stove off and all we're going to do if we can get some cooperation here is we're going to add what's left of our chicken back in because somebody ate a bunch and we're going to stir this all up and that looks nice and thick that's what we want okay and that right there folks is all there is to make an old-fashioned chicken and dumplings with drop dumplings this will be the hillbilly kitchens last video for 2015 so Sharla that I want to wish all of you a happy healthy be here and we'll see you in 2016 so don't forget to click like and subscribe for you thanks for joining us and god bless you all

Channel: The Hillbilly Kitchen - Down Home Country Cooking

Views: 261,103

Keywords: the hillbilly kitchen, chicken and dumplings, homemade chicken and dumplings, how to make chicken and dumplings, cooking, food, dumplings, chicken recipe, chicken and dumplings recipe, how to, chicken & dumplings, how to make homemade chicken and dumplings, chicken, drop dumplings, granny's chicken and dumplings, world's best chicken and dumplings, Biscuit Chicken and Dumlings, Chicken 'n' Dumplins, 100 year old recipe, heirloom recipe, depression cooking, chicken breast recipe

Id: xvwvtxfddjI

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2016