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Hi everyone, this is Stephanie Manley with CopyKat dot com. Today I'm going
to show you how to make one of Cracker Barrel's most requested side dishes,
and that is for their dumplings. Now, their dumplings don't actually have
meat in them, so it's just straight-up dumplings, but we're going to make a
delicious sauce, and we are going to use something called soup base. And if
you've never used soup base before it's sold in your grocery store right
next to the bullion. This simply has a better flavor with less salt. So I
think this is a great choice to make our dumplings.
So let me show you how to make the dumplings. So we're going to go ahead,
and start mixing our dumplings now. Please click on the description down
below to get the exact amounts here.
I have a couple of cups of flour in here. Now I'm going to add my baking
powder, and salt. We add baking powder so they have a little bit of lift,
because if you don't you're going to have very hard biscuits that won't be
very good at all. We're going to add our salt now. I'm going my vegetable
oil, and my milk.
We're just going to stir this together to make a nice dough. OK, so we're
going to turn our dough onto our mixing board, and my dough is a little bit
sticky, so I'm just going to go ahead, and mix in a little bit of flour
with this. You want to add just enough flour to where it's not sticking to
your hands anymore. Don't add any extra flour. If you add more flour it
just makes them a little bit tough, so add as little as possible, so I
think is great now. So I'm going to go ahead stick a little flour on my
rolling pin, and now I'm just going to go ahead, and roll out my dumplings.
Now I have a French rolling pin, if you have the other kind that's great
too, this just happens to be the kind that I have. So we're just going to
roll these out. Now we're going to go ahead, and cut our dumplings, and all
you need to do is take a knife, and just kind of run this along your board.
And the Cracker Barrel's are kind of square shape, so just go ahead, and
make them into square shapes. And the next thing we're going to do is we're
going to go ahead, and cook these in our liquid.
So now we're going to go ahead, and we're going to cook our dumplings. Now
I'm going to add a couple of teaspoons of the soup base to the pot, this
will make the dumplings taste extra good, because they're going to be
cooking in seasoned water, so they will pick up the flavors of the
seasoning you really want, And you can probably do this with chicken stock,
or chicken broth. And the next thing we're going to do is we're just going
to add in our dumplings, and we're going to cook them as long as it'll take
for them to float.
It takes a couple of minutes. You're going to do these in small batches,
and then we're going to pull them out, and we're going to make more
dumplings.
So now it's time to go ahead, and make the sauce to go with the dumplings,
because as you know Cracker Barrel really just serves these as a side dish.
So to make a sauce, we're just going to put some butter into a pot over
kind of medium heat, we're going to melt it, and we're going to go ahead,
and add our flour.
Now again, click in the description box below the recipe here for the exact
ingredients and instructions. So we're going to put our flour in here, and
we're going to make a roux, so we're just going to let this melt together,
and it's going to form a paste. And we want to let it cook for a moment, or
two, and we want to wait until it begins to smell something like pie crust.
We need to cook this just to make sure that the flour doesn't taste raw. So
it's really important to let this cook for a moment, or two.
All right, so now we can go ahead, and start adding in our liquid. Now our
first addition of liquid is some milk, as you know the sauce is nice, and
creamy. So we're going to add in our milk. I'm going to add in about the
one half cup of milk, and we're just going to stir this until it becomes a
uniform thickness mixture, and then we're going to go ahead, and add in the
rest of our milk.
OK, you can see that it's become thick, and we're going to add in the
remainder of our milk. Just going to blend this in. My recipe has a little bit of sugar in it. We're going to add a little
bit of pepper, and now I'm going to go ahead, and add in a little more
of this soup base so it has a really nice flavor, so I'm not going to add
salt with this roux. I'm going to stir that in to where again it gets nice,
and thick.
OK, so this has become thick again, and now I'm going to go ahead, and add
some of the water that the dumplings cooked in to thin it out. So we're
going to add about a cup, or so of this, and we're going to stir that in.
It'll begin to thicken, and then we'll get ready to stick our dumplings in.
OK, so our sauce is done, our dumplings are done. Now before we serve this
we're simply going to ladle on some of that wonderful sauce that we just
made. And here you go, we have the Cracker Barrel dumplings. Now again if
you have some chicken on hand you can go ahead, and put that in, cooked
chicken, that is. And add this in to make a meal.
But if you enjoyed this video, please give it a big thumbs up here on
YouTube, and drop me a comment in the box down below, and let me know what
recipe you'd like to see next. And be sure to subscribe so you can see
what's coming up next, because we've got lots more videos coming up, here
on Copy Cat Recipes.