While away last week, we learned that we were invited to a soup party (each guest brings a soup) the day after we got home. I immediately decided I'd rather do something new rather than fall back on an repertoire staple, so away from my kitchen, a computer and my books, I mentally searched among experiences old and new for inspiration. A craving for chicken pot pie led to some white meat thinking and reminded me of being 16 or 17, when I found a recipe god knows where for a chicken and tarragon soup with baby dumplings. I was the family cook then, and had never had a dumpling of any kind nor had I ever tasted tarragon, so the soup sounded like a great learning experience and I made a batch. And I loved it. But only for about 30 minutes, when the fact that I had contracted a flu bug became disastrously apparent. I couldn't stand the smell of tarragon for years after. It would be a fun project of the Unfinished Business sort to create my own new version of that dish, so I pitched that to Bob along with a white bean/kale/sausage alternative. And somehow that led to us talking about the baseball-sized herb-flecked knodel we'd just had at an Austrian restaurant, charcroute, sauerkraut and Lidia Bastianich's canerdli, which I posted a recipe for here but haven't made myself, and deciding that the soup we were hungriest for would involve ham hocks and some kind of small herb dumplings.
I just wasn't sure how to go about the dumplings: the recipe for that first long-ago batch is long gone, and I haven't made anything like it since. The baking powder and all purpose flour type of dough one would add to chicken-and-dumplings wouldn't have enough structure to roll around in broth. And whatever I made would need to be able to hold for a few hours in broth without getting bloated. So what I ended up doing was making a dough out of a loaf of stale white sourdough bread that had been in the fridge for two weeks, milk, flour, eggs and herbs. It took several test dumplings to get a dough that wouldn't float apart in boiling water--I got there, one small handful of panko at a time--and I removed the finished dumplings when they eventually rose to the surface to a nonstick skillet on low heat with a bit of butter and oil in it to 'seal' them up. This, I figured, would prevent the dumplings from overcooking once added to the ham hock broth I was cooking separately. Sound thinking, and they tasted good, but now I had a new problem: the dumplings in the skillet were a lot denser than what had come out of the boiling water. My floaters had become sinkers.
Oh well: no time for a redo, I had to go with it. So, deflated, I put the dumplings in the Dutch oven I planned to reheat and serve my soup in, and just before we left the house I ladled a pleasing amount of broth over and added the shredded meat from the ham hocks, cooked green beans, a few wads of sauerkraut and a big handful of fresh parsley, chives, rosemary and thyme. An hour later when I went to heat up my soup for service, I could hardly believe what I saw when I removed the lid: the dumplings had almost doubled in size. What had been approximately quarter-sized pellets of raw dough and barely 50 cent sized once boiled had swelled into golf balls. But they weren't falling apart, and they didn't 'shed' when stirred. I put one in my mouth: it was wonderful, light and tender! The only problem I had now was that the broth-to-dumpling ratio was too low, but borrowing a can of chicken broth from my hostess fixed that. My soup was a success after all.
But what a lot of drama. Does anyone here have a good dumpling dough that can go straight into a soup and not overcook if left sitting in broth? Matzoh might, though I've always made them large as I understand is Jewish tradition, and never made them small like I needed them to be for this soup.