French Kitchen: Bouillon de Poulet avec des Quenelles de Volailles

Welcome back!

In the vein of yesterday's dreamy love letter to French cuisine, I would like today to write the post which I originally intended to write yesterday - a culinary tale of French food made in my American kitchen.  On the menu for today's post: Bouillon de Poulet avec des Quenelles de Volailles.  Or, Chicken Dumpling Soup.

I feel like there are few things which are more down-home American than Chicken and Dumplings.  And yet somehow, when I began flipping through Rachel Khoo's The Little Paris Kitchen cookbook, this was one of the first recipes that drew my eye and caught my interest.  I think the reason it intrigued me was because of the dumplings, or quenelles - unlike the American versions of flat noodley concoctions or mounds of floating Bisquick, these dumplings were finely shaped little creatures, derived from flipping the dumpling back and forth between two spoons before gently gliding the dumpling into the boiling stock.  What's more, the chicken was all mashed up inside the breading of the dumplings...meaning that the dumplings were, in fact, chicken dumplings.

So I gathered all my ingredients together and proceeded to begin with the journey.  As I said yesterday, despite the wonders attributed to French food, the ingredients they use aren't all that different from those found in your average American grocery store.  Today we have: White bread, eggs, chicken breast, carrots, nutmeg, parsley, salt, mushrooms, chicken stock, salt, and half and half.  Please ignore the Royal Wedding Commemorative Tea Tin in the background of the photo (or celebrate it's kitschy glory, if you prefer - in fact, that's the option you should choose.)

First thing to do is to chop up some carrots.  The recipe called for two carrots, diced.  Pro-tip: if you don't want to buy big carrots, buy baby carrots and line them up to look like normal carrots to figure out how many you need to use.

That'll do.

Next, get some chicken stock a'boiling, and dunk those carrots right on in there.

Meanwhile, it's time for the fun part - blending almost all the other ingredients together into a gooey mess of chickeny-eggy-bready wonder.  Toss about 1 chicken breast, one egg plus one egg yolk (separating eggs for the win), a piece of bread without crusts, some half and half, a pinch of nutmeg, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of pepper into the blender.  And then blend it up.  Blend that baby up real good.

Now if you, like me, have a sub-par blender, this might actually be kind of tricky.  The ingredients are supposed to combine to form a sticky paste-like dough, which kind of gets stuck in the blades and causes it not to blend too easily.  I found that mixing things around with a wooden spoon handle and shaking the pitcher back and forth like a lunatic in between blending helped overcome this difficulty.

After everything is blended and pasty, it's time to make the quenelles!  Basically, you take a spoon in each hand, pick up some of the dumpling dough, and scoop the dough back and forth from spoon to spoon until it makes a nice little oval.  Unfortunately I don't have a photo of this part because I, like most humans, do not have three hands.  But here's a video showing the general idea...



By this point, the boiling chicken stock should have made the carrots tender enough for a soup.  As you shape each quenelle, drop it gently into the (still boiling) soup.  It will sink to the surface at first, and then rise up all nice and fluffy once it's cooked, about five minutes later.  After all the quenelles seem to be floating merrily along, toss in some sliced mushrooms to finish things off.  Let it cook just a bit more to tenderize the mushrooms a bit.

RISE, my dumplings, RISE!

And voila! Plate things up, sprinkle on some parsley, and you have for yourself a lovely chicken soup with some happy little quenelles French-ing things up.  I served mine with a simple cranberry and blue cheese salad with a bit of olive oil.  It made for quite the pretty little meal.

The quenelles were fascinating little things.  The texture wasn't at all like American dumplings - it was quite sponge-like and springy.  You could obviously taste the chicken, but you couldn't see it at all.  Essentially, you have on your hands some little chicken breads.  It was a bit unusual at first, but, after the surprise of the first bite, they're quite good.  The nutmeg really adds a depth of flavor to the dumpling.  In fact, I've cooked several French recipes now, and there always seems to be some nutmeg involved.  Perhaps we have discovered the French secret to culinary greatness.

So there you have it!  Quenelles de poulet, brought to you by my Tennessee apartment kitchen.  See you next time for more cultural escapades!