Recipe for chicken tomato soup with soft and tender flour dumplings. Ingredients (6-8 servings):
• A small onion
• A small carrot
• A small celery (the size of a duck egg) with all the stem
• A small green bell pepper
• A small red bell pepper
• Carcass and wings from a chicken
• 600 g of fresh tomatoes
• Vinegar from the hot pepper jar
• A bunch of greens with leaves of celery, parsley and lemongrass
• Salt
For dumplings we need:
• 100 g of white flour, i.e. 000 or 480
• 100 ml chicken soup
• 50 g of poultry fat
• 2 eggs
• Salt
We take a chicken, remove the bones and the breast (which we keep for other dishes), and cut the carcass and wings into smaller pieces and put them in a pot with a volume of at least 4 liters. Add 1.5-1.7 liters of water, a not very full teaspoon of salt and bring to a boil.
We remove the foam that forms on the surface. When the foam stops forming, put the lid on so that not too much water evaporates, turn the heat to low and cook for 30 to 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, dice the onion, celery root and bell pepper. Cut the carrot and celery stalk into rounds. I put most of the tomatoes on a grater with large meshes. We throw away the skin. A small part of the tomatoes can be diced for texture (optional).
In winter, you can use chopped tomatoes in a jar instead of fresh tomatoes - I gave you the recipe a few weeks ago. Remember that those also contain salt, so add less salt when cooking the meat. If you have other forms of tomatoes that you boiled and reduced, then you will put less. How much you have to judge based on the product you have.
After the meat is cooked, set aside 100 ml of the soup for the dumplings. Add the chopped vegetables. Let them boil.
While the vegetables are softening, prepare the flour dumplings. In a small saucepan, put the soup you reserved earlier, together with the poultry fat. Poultry fat is very important, because it gives taste and tenderness to flour dumplings. Where do we get poultry fat from? You can buy duck or goose lard in the supermarket. (I also used this here). Or when you have a fatter chicken, collect the fat and the excess skin from it and put everything in a pan with minimal heat. Let it melt slowly. Then put the fat left in the pan in a jar and keep it in the fridge for when you need it.
When the liquid boils, add all the flour at once and mix well until it is completely hydrated and gathers into a lump. Take it off the heat and let it cool down a bit.
Add eggs one by one and incorporate completely.
It matches the taste of salt - very important. Dumplings without salt taste bland. Make sure they have enough salt. You can even add ground white pepper and very finely chopped greens, if you wish.
After the vegetables have cooked, you can add the grated tomatoes and diced tomatoes. Boil again. Form small dumplings using two teaspoons and put them in the soup. Let them boil for 10 minutes (the flour is already cooked, only the egg is raw).
At the end, season the soup with salt (if necessary) and sour cream. I advise you to use vinegar from the jar of hot peppers or lychee from the jar of donuts in vinegar.
Add fresh greens as desired. I recommend a mixture of celery leaves, parsley and leustean. Have an appetite dear ones!