Has the title intrigued you? When Chef John first teased the name, I was thinking old style apple dumplings, where the apple is covered in a pastry and baked, and some sort of gravy is involved. Not the case. This recipe, this “apple sausage gravy dumplings”, is more akin to chicken and dumplings than anything else.
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So as mentioned, this is a Chef John recipe.
So as I said earlier, this is akin to chicken and dumplings. The main difference is that instead of making a chicken soup as the dumpling medium, you make sausage gravy—as in biscuits and gravy—as your dumpling medium.
So that little pan Chef John made wouldn’t be enough for meals for a week for me, so as usual I adjusted.
So the first thing I did was double the pork sausage. I also had a small thing of diced pancetta in my freezer that needed to be used, so what the heck. Then in went some Jimmy Dean cause it was on sale and therefore cheaper than the store made sausage. Then I added the onion after browning.
I added butter and flour to make the roux, then I added a gala apple. It held up through the whole cooking process. I also added a nice splash of apple cider vinegar.
I added a box of chicken stock and a quart of milk. I also added lots of pepper, because sausage gravy, and because I needed some vegetables to give an illusion of healthfulness, I added a can of sweet corn and a can of Italian style green beans.
Meanwhile, I made a variation on my mom’s Kluski kładzione recipe. I got a couple eggs in a bowl and beat them up. Then I added some sour cream and beat that up as well. Then went some self rising flour. I usually use just AP flour, but I decided why not. Then the main part of the liquid. Chef John uses regular apple cider, but I went with Stella Artois “Cidre” as the liquid. Because bubbles and alcohol make for a nice mix.
I scooped them out into the liquid, covered the pot, and let it go for like 15 minutes or so, et voila!
Here’s the part where I talk about my flaws in this preparation. First, the dough was a bit too “wet”. It was closer to a spaetzle than a dumpling dough. Second, and most importantly, I got kinda scared about the stuff scorching to the bottom of the pot and overbubbling, so I didn’t have the temperature as high as it should have been to properly cook the dumplings. So the dumplings broke up and wound up being rather small to a bit larger dumpling-ettes. And some of the dough mixed in with the gravy like extra roux. Still good though. Another thing I would change is that I would not use the splash of vinegar. Or I would use a much smaller splash. Instead of the mellow flavor of a good sausage gravy, the flavor was sharper. The apple flavor didn’t change but the vinegar enhanced and brought out the acidity in the fruit. And when added to the Stella Artois Cidre in the dough it became very acid forward.
Still though…
It was VERY good.
I would DEFINITELY make this again with some minor tweaks. Like no vinegar, and actually adjusting the dumpling dough as I normally do to make it the consistency I’m accustomed to. I may use regular AP flour as well. But all in all, a successful experiment.
This week’s meal prep is going to be a kind of pork loin and stuffing casserole like situation in which I throw pork loin, a mix of cream of celery, sour cream and chicken broth, and box stuffing in which I mix in sauteed onions and celery. Maybe also some frozen corn. I throw it all in the slow cooker and let it go. Then I shred the pork, and mix everything together. I’ve seen it done with chicken and turkey on line, so it should work well with pork loin.
So tonight’s discussion topic is mixing strange (for that recipe) ingredients into a standard recipe and making it into something like, yet unlike the original. Let’s hear some creation stories!
