Cozy Creamy Chicken and Dumplings

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Homemade chicken and dumplings soup is the south's ultimate comfort food. This easy recipe is completely from-scratch, including the herbaceous drop dumplings and creamy soup, and it's made in under an hour.

Out of all the chicken recipes, from scratch, old-fashioned chicken and dumplings is probably my biggest cold weather family favorite. On a cold night, nothing is better than a bowl of flavorful chicken soup with tender dumplings and veggies in a delicious broth.

Jump to:

• Origins of Chicken and Dumplings
• How to Make Easy Chicken and Dumplings from Scratch
• Storing and Freezing
• More Cozy Soups and Stews:
• Recommended Tools
• 📖 Recipe

Origins of Chicken and Dumplings

Many of us think of chicken and dumplings as a way to stretch an affordable protein to make a hearty and delicious meal, and legend has it that the dish came around during the Great Depression in the 1930's or during the Civil War.

And that legend just isn't true!

Dumplings themselves are thousands of years old, many historians and experts think that a Chinese doctor named Zhang Zhongjing during the Eastern Han Dynasty (206 AD-220 AD) invented dumplings, filling dough with mutton, chilis, and warming herbs to give to the homeless during the winter.

But simple soup dumplings being an addition to chicken stew didn't come about until around 1830, where the wealthy plantation owner and U.S. Grand Marshall's wife, Mary Rudolph, published a cookbook that had a beef fat drop dumplings recipe with stewed red meat. Experts believe the recipes came from her enslaved chefs, as it was highly uncommon for wealthy white women to cook or involve themselves in drudgery at that time.

In 1879 another Southern cookbook, Housekeeping in Old Virginia, called for boiling a whole chicken and then creating dumplings made with biscuit dough, but rolled thin'. This was called Chicken Slick or 'chicken and slick dumplings' because the dumplings are flat, slick, and noodle-like, and it's the most popular form of southern chicken and dumplings.

Now, about that whole 'great depression' legend. Chicken dinners before industrialized agriculture and World War II was a luxury, where a plump hen cost more per pound than any other meat at the market. Yard birds were kept to help with farming or home gardens, and for their fresh eggs, not for meat.

In fact, a committee during President Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign placed ads promising 'a chicken in every pot', a quote from 18th century Henry IV of France who claimed he 'didn't want a single person in his realm to be so poor that they'd be without a chicken in his pot on Sundays.' In other words, have chickens and being able to eat them was a symbol of prosperity.

So to cook your chickens in a dish was rare and meant only for special occasions. And since these birds were much older than the tender young ones we eat nowadays, they were tough and needed to be slowly braised or stewed.

Hence, the chicken and dumplings stew; it was a dish of prosperity and hospitality, it's even mentioned in that song She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain. The singer was going to serve the guest chicken and dumplings when she came from 'round the mountain!

How to Make Easy Chicken and Dumplings from Scratch

Honestly, to make the best homemade chicken and dumplings you need to understand each aspect of the stew: the chicken, the dumplings, and the gravy/soup.

Boneless, Skinless Chicken Thighs. You can also have the usual bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs as well. But absolutely no boneless skinless chicken breasts!

Butter and Oil. Oil will help keep the butter from burning so use a high heat oil like grapeseed, vegetable, or avocado.

Celery, Medium Carrots, and Yellow Onions. Wash, peel, and dice them up nicely. You can add other vegetables like green beans as well.

Garlic Cloves. Mince it nicely or leave them whole, they end up melting away into the soup regardless.

Herbs. I love fresh thyme in here along with some poultry seasoning and, of course, gotta throw in a bay leaf for every soup.

Chicken broth or chicken stock. To have a delicious savory broth, you need more than just water! If you don't have some homemade chicken stock or broth, my favorite thing to use is Better than Bouillon concentrate.

Heavy Cream. This is what gives us that rich and creamy soup situation. You can also substitute in whole milk, half and half, or evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed milk! Totally different thing.)

The melt-in-your-mouth dumplings is made with a simple dough:

All Purpose Flour. Do not use bread flour for this, the proteins will cause gluten activation.

Baking Powder. This is our leavener to make those dumplings nice and plump and fluffy. Pro Tip: Use fresh baking powder! Baking powder has a 'lifespan' of about 6 months. The older it is, the less likely it is to work.

Herbs. While optional, I love adding in some fresh thyme or dried oregano into my dumplings! Flavor, honey!

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Buttermilk. The acidity is what gives us more lift by reacting with the baking powder. If you don't have buttermilk, a great sub is whole milk/heavy cream/half and half with about 2 teaspoons of lemon juice or white vinegar to help sour the milk up and give it more acidity.

The Chicken

An old fashioned chicken and dumplings recipe calls for boiling a whole chicken, both to create a broth and to cook the meat. I honestly don't recommend using a whole chicken or chicken breasts, as I've seen in other recipes. Chicken has different types of meat (white and dark) that cook through at different times and hold up differently to being stewed or braised.

Chicken breasts do not like being cooked for longer periods of time, even if 30-45 minutes isn't as long as stewing for hours, it still will end up overcooked, dry, and even crumbly. Not what we are looking for.

The best chicken pieces to use are juicy chicken thighs, which are tender and hold up to braising and stewing better than the chicken breasts. Try to find them 'boneless and skinless' in the grocery store to make this recipe much easier, unless you like braised chicken skin (which some of us do!), then use whole chicken thighs, slowly stew them over about an hour and a half, and then remove the bone and shred for the soup once they're cooked through.

For this recipe, we give the chicken thighs a beautiful sear before starting the soup so that we can get the Maillard Reaction.

If you're new around here and haven't heard me yammer on about what that is, it's the reaction that makes food brown and taste good (and yes, it's different from caramelization!). We want that browning, it does make a difference! And the rendered chicken fat is excellent to cook the vegetables in.

We don't need to use the chicken to make chicken broth, since we tend to have some form of it in home either homemade, boxed, or in bouillon form.

If you want to make this a super fast weeknight meal, a great cheat ingredient is to use a rotisserie chicken and put the shredded chicken into the pot of veggies and dumplings until the chicken is warmed through.

The Dumplings

There are different methods to making dumplings, but here's the main three that are most used in a chicken and dumpling recipe.

1. The 'slick' dumpling. Remember, we talked about these in the origins of the dumpling. These are homemade dumplings that are 'made like biscuits, but rolled flat'. My mama makes her chicken and dumplings with these flat, square slick dumplings and so do many people in the south.
2. The fluffy dumplings. These are the ones I love, and it's such a simple recipe. Made with buttermilk and baking powder, though I add herbs, garlic powder and onion powder in the dumpling dough for more flavor, these dumplings are easily whipped up in a small bowl, scooped up with a spoon or cookie scoop, then dropped into the bubbling stew. Consider these to be a type of enriched drop-biscuit. They're soft, fluffy, and sort of melt in your mouth, but my favorite thing about them is that they help thicken the chicken stew to a rich gravy as they cook through.
3. The biscuit dumpling. These are definitely a popular shortcut, using pop-can biscuits and then dropping them into the chicken stock to cook with the soup.

Making Fluffy Dumplings from Scratch

It seems like this would be difficult, but these delicious dumplings are incredibly simple to make all in one bowl. Stir together the flour, salt, garlic and onion powder, and baking powder, then add the herbs and buttermilk until the flour is just completely moistened. We don't want to activate that gluten in the flour, you'll end up with tough, dense dumplings instead of light, fluffy ones.

Twenty minutes before the end of cooking, scoop the dumpling dough and drop them gently onto the top of the soup and then put the lid on. The dumplings will cook, puff up even more, and the flour will help thicken up the soup into a saucy gravy. Especially if you give the stew a couple of stirs while the dumplings cook to break them up a little.

The Soup

Nothing is more sad than a disappointing soup or stew. For this pot of creamy chicken and dumplings, we start with the mirepoix: carrots, celery, and onion. They get sauteed in that delicious chicken fat from us searing the chicken in the large dutch oven. Oh, did I forget to mention that this is a one pot recipe? Cuz it is!

With the sauteed veg, we add herbs like thyme and a teaspoon poultry seasoning and some minced garlic. With soup you want to make layers of flavor, otherwise it'll be a very flat taste. Remember that next time you're making soup!

With that, we add a bit of extra flour and a little fat like olive oil or butter to coat the vegetables, then add in the chicken stock or broth and another herb: the soup savior, the bay leaves.

Add the chicken back to the simmering soup, let cook and then add the dumplings. I like to add a nice dose of heavy cream because hey, this is classic chicken comfort food that we're serving to guests...or at least our family. The heavy cream makes this chicken and dumplings recipe a clear winner: it's so creamy and hearty without the use of cream of chicken soup or anything canned. You can replace the heavy cream with whole milk if you don't have it on hand.

Storing and Freezing

Chicken and dumplings is simple to store, keep it in an airtight container in the fridge for up to five days. You can easily rewarm it in a microwave-safe dish until hot or over medium-low in a small saucepan until warmed through.

To freeze, portion out your soup into single servings and put each serving into a freezer safe container or zip-top bag. Freeze (freeze the bags flat for easy thawing) for up to six months; to thaw, leave in fridge overnight before reheating using the same methods as above.

More Cozy Soups and Stews:

• Easy Homemade Beef Stew
• Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup
• The Best Traditional French Onion Soup
• Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon
• Tonkotsu Ramen Recipe

Recommended Tools

6 QT Dutch Oven

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