Dumplings
FEB09
Forming Bread Dumplings
Picking up the story fromYESTERDAY’S BLOGPOST, I arrived to help Scoots move into his new place and found myself making him goulash with bread dumplings.
Well, the experience of making dumplings is actually really fun, and it made me want to eat them all the time.
Yum!
They have a completely welcoming feel and make you want to eat stews all the time! I’ll preface the recipe by saying that, ideally, you want to be able to cook the well-formed dumplings in the stock of the stew you are making as you go. However, often chips of bread will pop off into the stew, so in order to avoid the stew becoming full of pits of bread, you can boil them separately.
Boil Them Loosely in Your Pot
This action will make for a clearer stew, but not necessarily as flavorful of a dumpling. I tried doing something in between: boiling them first, letting the bread flake off in the rolling boil, and then placing them with a gentle “plop!” into the simmering goulash. The results were outstanding, and Scoots informed me that days later he ate the goulash and dumplings for lunch, and the meal reheated just wonderfully tasting like a million bucks! Gotta love feedback like that.
Viennese Bread Dumplings
Ingredients
2 c of diced white bread, use more or less in order to ensure consistency. Read rest of recipe of better detail. (I’ll be honest, I used all sorts of different dry/stale bread I had and it came out just beautifully; no need to obsess about the color of the bread, unnecessarily).
3 tolive oil
2 eggs
¾ c milk
3 T freshly chopped parsley
1 small onion
Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste
2 c of diced white bread, use more or less in order to ensure consistency. Read rest of recipe of better detail. (I’ll be honest, I used all sorts of different dry/stale bread I had and it came out just beautifully; no need to obsess about the color of the bread, unnecessarily).
3 tolive oil
2 eggs
¾ c milk
3 T freshly chopped parsley
1 small onion
Freshly ground salt and pepper to taste
Well-formed Dumplings
Soak the bread cubes in a mixture of the eggs and about half the milk for at least 30 minutes. Be aware that depending on your bread, the dumpling “batter” can get soggy, so adjust the amount of milk based on how soggy the mixture gets as you add in the liquid. If after 30 minutes you can easily form balls of bread dumplings from the milk-soaked bread cubes, you are on the right track. If not, do what I did: add in bread crumbs. It was a messy job (see photos!).
If really sticky, boil separately in a pot of water. If the dumplings are holding together well, then place gently in the goulash. As the goulash should be simmering nicely, they can sit in there for the last 10-20 minutes of cooking, so long as you keep turning them.
The dumplings will soak up much of the liquid as you cook them, becoming really tasty. An added benefit? As they cook in the stew and stock, they will thicken the soupy flavorful liquid, making it into what you may know as goulash.
So, take the time, get creative, and make bread dumplings out of a bunch of old bread you have lying around or on your counter or in your freezer. It’ll surprise you how tasty you can make bread that starts out so stale and lousy.
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- Would love to try this with the chicken paprikash recipe I shared with you a few months ago. This looks wonderful.
