Hi, I am Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. We are going to be making a side dish and it is called Updated Homestyle Dumplings. You have had dumplings I am sure and usually they are made, if they are homemade then they are made with a dough and a rolled out and cut and there is lot of effort and time that it goes into making that. I am saying that mine are updated because I am going to use canned refrigerated biscuits. I have got a couple of small cans here and I am going to use some chicken broth and that is all there is to it.

This is a 14½ ounce can of chicken broth. I will say that it is important to pick a kind of chicken broth that you are familiar with and that you like because it is not necessary at the expense of the chicken broth but the quality. And sometimes I have tried chicken broth for this recipe or maybe a related recipe and it is just not tasting as good because the broth itself did not taste as good. So just see at something that you maybe have used before and depend on and trust and that will make this a delight.

The two cans I have here of refrigerated biscuits are called Butter Me Not varieties I find that those work best and that if you do not have those you could use another kind. I would rather not use the Tender Flake or the ones that kind of vary in layers. It is not really the dumpling style. So, if you can get something that is like the Butter Me Not, I have already started opening these because I didn’t want to have to pop them and make a big noise but each of them has five in the container and you can get a container of 10. So, my rule is the ratio is one can of 10 biscuits to one can of the 14½ ounce chicken broth.

So, what I need to do is get these biscuits someway into there. I could just start tearing them with my fingers and you know however they end up it is fine. I mean that is the way dumplings look but it is so much easier just to take your kitchen shears and just quarter these. Do you see how nice it is to get those into quarters? And then just drop them in. And here is one of my secrets. Drop them into room temperature broth. Do not bring the broth to a boil on the stove and then put them in. What would happen in that case is when they hit that hot broth, they will fluff out and start to bake and they will be nice and puffy and tasty but they will not be the traditional old-fashioned type of dumpling that I was raised with. Now, maybe you are not looking for the same thing that I like but I like the center to be chewy and gummy and that is the old-fashion home style dumpling. So, give me a second here and I am just going to chop all these into quarters and put them in here, I will go over the stove and I will heat these and then I will let you see what they look like while they are boiling.

You can tell when your dumplings are done by looking at them and seeing if they are nice and bubbly and kind of brown like this. They will be thicker the more you have stirred them. You do not have to stir them constantly. In fact if you do, they probably will just be one big mash. So, you want to keep the separate pieces so you just stir it occasionally. And for this batch it took I think three minutes for it to comeback to a boil and then I have been letting it cook on low heat for about eight minutes. And just stirring occasionally and this is what we have. So, I am going to bring it over here and just ladle this into a serving bowl. And you do want it to have some gravy left there, so if you stir it too vigorously throughout the cooking; you may have destroyed all of the broth and let all of the biscuits absorb that broth so that there really is not much gravy but it is a nice looking dish like that. And when you serve some to your guest, you will just add a dip in, get some hair from the end, try it some gravy with it too, it is a nice lovely gravy. And then for myself, I like to use fresh ground pepper on top of it, so you just crack a little bit there to the top of it and let us see what the texture has come out like. I will just take one of these, I can get it on a cork, it is hot. There you see that? Well, it is kind of got that gluey chewy gumminess that is traditional in home style dumplings. I think you will like it.