chicken noodle soup

This is not Mother's chicken 'n dumplings. My mothers's chicken and dumplings would more properly be called chicken and noodles. I didn't know what a proper dumpling was until they served it in school cafeteria. Even so, this was my favorite thing my mother made.

The chief difference, if you discount poblano pepper and avocado, I use roasted chicken parts and broth previously frozen, and dear ol' Mom boiled a whole chicken. My egg noodles are mostly semolina, her's 100% AP flour, which suited us kids just fine, with our perverse taste sense that considered a hospital menu haute cuisine.

Roasting chicken and vegetables concentrates flavor. Boiling chicken and vegetables dilutes flavor into the water, which isn't altogether bad because is all still there in the water, but it forfeits the additional flavor that would be possible by the chemical reaction between amino acid and reducing sugar of singed foods known as Maillard. Now there's a bit you can take with you to culinary school to put you a step ahead of the class.

The vegetables were sautéed in butter/olive oil until they burned on the bottom of the pan. Those burnt bits, the fond, was lifted off naturally by the broth and floated around the soup. Excess flour dusting the noodles thickend the broth.

Pictured below: broth frozen in cubes, frozen chicken bits, semolina egg dough, vegetables.

Not pictured: garlic, sage, cilantro, S/P.







I like it when noodles stick together forming a careless gloppy noodle clump. For some reason that appeals to me.