Chicken and Pastry
Date Completed: 4/24/2021
Today I bring you a steaming hot bowl of comfort food from the As Good As Grandma’s chapter of The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook. We’re actually making the very first recipe of that entire book: Chicken and Pastry.
This recipe stood out to me every time I paged through the book. It adds a little flair to the familiar chicken noodle soup that I thought would be fun and delicious!
The pastry comes together first when you combine a flour mixture with milk and melted butter. This is stirred up and then kneaded until it forms a smooth ball.
Next: brown the chicken. This recipe calls for chicken thighs with skin and bones still on. You pat the chicken dry and sprinkle with salt and pepper before browning it with butter in a Dutch oven. The chicken browns for about 4 minutes per side, until you see the great color developing!
Once brown, you cover the chicken with a combination of broth and water. You also throw in half a stalk of celery and one onion. This gets covered and simmers on low for about 25 minutes.
While the soup simmers, you roll out the pastry dough into a 12-inch square. Or as close to a square as you can get it!
This next one may have been the most satisfying step! You take a pizza cutter and slice the dough into 1-inch strips. Then use the pizza cutter to slice diagonal lines to form diamond shapes. Look how pretty these turn out! I also love how you can see all that pepper in the dough diamonds.
Remove the chicken from the soup and add in the pastry diamonds. These simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes. They puff up as they cook - so cute! They look like little pillows.
I promised Garrett that when I had the next recipe that called for shredding chicken he could show me his favorite method: using a hand mixer. It did work! We learned that you have to press down on the chicken rather firmly with the mixer to get it nicely shredded. We finished the last few big pieces with our hands.
The soup is almost done! Once the pastry is cooked through, you add the shredded chicken back in and taste for seasoning. At this point we added quite a bit of pepper and a pinch of salt.
Time to eat!
Taste Report:
The book describes this recipe as a Southern spin on chicken soup, and that is exactly how it tastes. The broth had so much flavor by itself. The pastry added a rich and velvety quality with a strong hint of pepper. The chicken itself made the entire bowl complete. I almost wished it had been raining the day we made it because this recipe had such a cozy feel.
Mess Report:
This photo only really captures half of the mess. The other half involved my countertops absolutely covered in flour from the kneading and rolling process. I will admit that these dishes did not get done until the following day. Who wants to wash dishes after enjoying such a cozy soup?
Just as the chicken and broth started simmering, Garrett requested that we make biscuits to go along with the soup. Carb city! They did complement it very well, though!
Nap time!