I’ve been making dumplings in stews for, ooh, forever. I always made them the way my Mum did, with Atora suet, using the recipe on the packet. And more often than not, I made solid cannon-balls, instead of the light, fluffy things I was intending to make.
Today, I found we had run out of suet. A quick scan of the entire internet (OK, I used a notorious search engine that shall not be named here) revealed that suet is not considered necessary. There were recipes using melted butter, and other recipes using olive oil.
All the recipes were pretty similar, take some self-raising flour, add a bit of baking powder, herbs if you like, salt, and more or less equal amounts of olive oil and milk. You only need just enough liquid to be able to form a dough from the dry ingredients. If it’s sticky, add more flour. If you mix it about too much, you’ll develop the gluten in the flour, and get cannon-balls…
To my great delight, the result was nice and fluffy!
Yes, that is a beer. We also ran out of red wine.
Definitely fluffy, not cannon-balls. No more suet for this purpose, then!
