How to Make QUICK Chicken and Pastry (aka Chicken and Dumplings)

Hey everyone! Welcome back to my channel. Today’s video I’m going to be showing you how to make Chicken and Pastry, but I’m going to skip the long process of cooking the chicken for an hour or more to get it nice and tender because I have right here — and I’m going to be doing this in a separate video — some chicken breast, bone-in chicken breast that I canned earlier this summer and what’s so great about this is chicken and pastry can take a long time to make, but when you do it like this, you can get it on the table in under an hour, start to finish, so it’s just such a great solution. This is one of our favorite things. It’s definitely a traditional eastern North Carolina meal, and oh by the way, a similar thing here can be done using corn meal dumplings. I have talked about making corn meal dumplings in my collards and corn meal dumplings video, which I’ll link somewhere up here, so you might want to check that out as well. Those same corn meal dumplings can be used in this, but I’m going to make chicken and pastry, show you how to do it, so stick with me and we’ll get right down to it.

Ok, here’s what you need to make chicken and pastry. You need some flour. I like to use my trusty, Daily Bread self-rising flour. This is my favorite self-rising flour. I use this for biscuits and anything that needs self-rising flour. You can use plain flour when you make pastry, but when you do that, then you have to add salt or another good solution would be to mix up some chicken broth and make your pastry with that. I also like to use a little bit of lard to go in my pastry. That’s not critical, you don’t have to do it. I like to do it. Really, all you need is the flour and the water and if it’s not self-rising flour, then you need salt. So I’m just going to get started making this and you can make this in any quantities you want. Since I’m just making enough to go with this one quart jar of chicken, which is about two pounds of bone-in chicken breast, I’m going to probably use about two to three cups of the self-rising flour.

Ok, I’m going to start with two cups.

I’m adding a little bit of lard. I don’t know how much lard this is, but this looks like it might be a tablespoon. Basically I’m just going to work this into the dough, kind of like you would if you were making biscuits. You know, you would work your butter or your lard or your shortening into your flour to make biscuits. You want it to be sort of a crumb texture so you do that same thing here when you’re making the pastry.

I think I’ve gotten that mixed in pretty well.

Now I’m just going to make a little well in the middle of that flour and this measuring cup is a two-cup measuring cup, but I don’t have anywhere near two cups of water in here. I’ve got about a cup of water in here, but I’m sure I’m not going to use anywhere close to that amount. I’m going to start with about a half-cup of warm water.

Get all that mixed in.

You know, this is one of those things you just kind of have to get a feel for it. Sometimes you might have to add more water, sometimes you might have to add more flour.

I’ll add just a tiny bit more water.

I will tell you you don’t want to overwork the flour because you know, like a lot of things — it’s not like bread dough where you’re kneading it and kneading it and kneading it. It can make it too tough. Personally, my son and I, we like our pastry a little bit chewy, but the less you work this, the fluffier and the less chewy it is. I kind of like to strike a nice balance but you just have to figure out what’s going to be best for you and your family.

Ok, just a tiny bit more.

The goal is I want to get it so that it will just get into a nice ball and hold together and not be crumbly, but not be too wet because I’m going to have to roll this out and I’m going to have to be able to get the pastry up and get it on the plate so I can let it chill before I cook it.

Some people at this point will even just take the dough and they’ll just break it off in little lumps and drop it in the broth. That’s not how I’m going to do it.

Ok, I’m going to get a little bit of flour to put on my rolling surface. This is just one of the silicone mats from my dehydrator. It’s so convenient, I can use it for a lot of things.

You don’t want your rolling pin to stick, so if that’s happening you can just sprinkle a little bit more flour.

And I don’t want to get this like paper thin because we like thick pastry. You can roll it out as thin as you want. This is self-rising flour so it’s going to puff up a little bit no matter what.

Alrighty. So now, I’m going to cut this pastry up into strips and I’m going to put it on the plate. And between each layer I’m going to add a small piece of wax paper to keep them from sticking together while it’s in the refrigerator.

And then I’m basically just going to let it chill long enough while I get my chicken in a pot and get some broth going and get that heated up and by the time that water’s come to a boil, this pastry is going to be cool enough and ready to drop in.

Ok, now I’m going to add a piece of wax paper and start another layer.

I don’t know if you can — Can you see that? You can definitely go a lot thinner on this, but like I said, we just like thick pastry and you’ll see how it is when it’s done. I’ll show you.

But this is one of those you just have to figure out how you’re going to like it.

And if you’re buying store-bought pastry, because I know that Auntie Ann’s has a version of store-bought pastry. That’s fine. I like homemade pastry. Nothing to me is as good as homemade pastry.

Alrighty. I’m going to stick this in the refrigerator and then I’m going to get the pot of chicken going and show you how that works.

Alright. I have this pot — let me show you — it’s not quite half-full of water. I don’t know if you can see that. So it’s probably a little over a third full.

Alright, so now I’m going to add this chicken breast.

You normally have to cook chicken for such a long time to get it as tender as the chicken is like this.

I’m going to put this burner on about medium.

And when I take this chicken out of the jar, I mean it is so tender. I’m going to do it like this because I don’t really care about having the bones in there. Although the bones, when you can chicken like this on the bone, it basically creates its own bone broth in the jar, which is so nutritious, so flavorful. It’s really just a neat, neat thing to do.

Think about it. Ok, let’s say you want to make chicken and pastry. You have to either go buy some fresh chicken from the store, or you have to have already bought some fresh chicken from the store, or you have to get it out of your freezer and if it’s in your freezer you have to thaw it first, but no matter what, there’s going to be a lot more time involved in it than being able to just pull some cooked chicken out of a jar and add it to a pot like this.

And while I’m off camera over here I’m just tossing out some of the bones. Probably for the purposes of being on camera it would be better if I had gone ahead and taken the chicken out of the jar, but I kind of wanted to show you what it’s like.

Get all that chicken out of the jar. I’ve pulled most of the bones out, which you don’t even have to do. I just don’t like picking bones out of my chicken and pastry. I’d rather just have the chicken and have the pastry and just dig in.

Ok now I need to add some bouillon, well, “Better than Bouillon” because the amount of broth that is in with the chicken breast in the jar is not enough so I added water as I said earlier to not quite half-pot here. Now I’m going to add two or three tablespoons of Better than Bouillon, just to create a good broth. I don’t even have much left in this jar so I’m just going to get out what’s left in this jar.

At this point, all I need to do is get this up to a boil and it’ll be ready to add the pastry.

Uh, yep. The chicken is definitely boiling. It’s time to drop in the pastry.

And the pastry is not cold by any means, it’s just I’ve gotten it chilled.

I’m going to start dropping this in, layer-by-layer.

And you don’t want to add it too fast. You’re not dumping it in in a race. You want to give each layer a chance to start to cook on the surface before you add the next layer. I’m going to check in a minute and make sure you can see — Yeah, I guess you can see that.

Alrighty. And I’m going to give that a minute before I add the next layer. You see how some of that pastry is puffing up? This is going to be so good, y’all!

See what happens is because the pastry is just a little bit cold when you add it to the pot, you sort of want to get things boiling again before you add more. Now, there we go, it’s boiling again.

Ok, I’ll add a little bit more over here.

Look y’all, as we move along on this channel and I make more videos, I’m going to learn more about how to get the camera positioned just right so that my arms aren’t in the way or things aren’t out of focus and things like that, so just bear with me. There’s a little bit of a learning curve here.

And what’s going to happen is as I get all of this pastry in the pot, I’m going to get the lid back on the pot and let it just cook for probably about fifteen, twenty minutes. Probably about fifteen minutes and I’ll check it again. And then I’ll be back with you and I’ll show you how it’s turned out.

Let’s check and see if this is done. I suspect it probably is.

And I’m going to get a nice bowl to serve some in.

Alright, it looks pretty done to me.

I’m going to test it like this. Yep, it seems pretty done. And if you ever want to just check it — this has been about 15 minutes — if you ever want to check it just to see if it seems done, just taste some. It’s going to be hot, obviously, so be careful. Let it cool first, but just taste some and then you’ll know that it’s done or if it needs to cook some more.

And all the chicken will have gone to the bottom of the pot because all of the pastry is floating up at the top.

Alrighty, that looks amazing.

That looks so good.

Ok, this looks so good. I’m going to add just a little bit of pepper because this is how we like to eat it and then it’s going to be time to dig in.

Alright, y’all. Well I’ve got to get this taken up to serve my family and actually I’m also going to serve some corn with this. I’ve got some Silver Queen Corn put up in my freezer and we love to have some corn on the side with chicken and pastry. This is really good. This is such a good comfort food. An easy meal that can be made, and if you want to make it with fresh chicken you’re just going to stew the chicken in the pot until it’s totally done, and then add your pastry. But as a convenience food, you can add a jar of chicken that you’ve canned and you can see the video on how to do that. But let me give this a taste and let you know how it is.

The pastry is my favorite part.

Oh, that’s perfect! This is so good and I can’t wait to dig in but I don’t want to eat too much because this is our supper tonight. Ok, thanks so much for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. Hit that little notification bell so you’ll know when new videos are posted and stay tuned for more. Thanks so much! Bye-bye!