When I make it, sometimes I serve over mashed potatoes, sometimes not, but always add some frozen vegetables to make it a more complete meal. And in general, always make it with Reames frozen egg noodles.
I saw a recipe on Pinterest for using sourdough discard in egg noodle dough, and the weather was a little gross this week, so it seemed a good time for some homemade chicken & noodles. We had a 10 lb bag of chicken leg quarters to use up (we decided to go in on a cow with my folks, so we're needing to clean out the freezer a bit), so last weekend I did roasted chicken & potatoes in the oven with half, and then cooked the rest in the Instant Pot with a couple cups of chicken broth. Once the chicken had cooled, I shredded it (made about 4 cups) and put it in the fridge for this recipe later, strained the stock from the Instant Pot & put it in a separate container (also made about 4 cups).
Noodles (makes about 2 lbs of noodles):
3 cups AP flour
3-4 eggs (I started with 3, but the dough was really crumbly & dry so I added another)
1 cup of sourdough discard
For this part--super simple. First thing in the morning, I put all the ingredients in my Kitchenaid stand mixer with a dough hook attachment, and then let it mix for about 10 minutes. Then I transferred the dough ball to another bowl, covered it and let it hang out all day while I was at work.
When I got home, I split the dough in half, then rolled it out to about a 1/4-1/2 inch thick (I need to get some rolling pin spacers so I can actually tell how thick dough is...in my mind it was nice and thin, but really it probably needed to be thinner, as we'll discuss later.) Then I used a pizza cutter to slice them into about the size of Reames noodles (1/2 inch wide by about 2-3 inches long)--enlisted the help of Lil' Man for a bit of it.
We only needed about a pound for the soup so I put the other half on a cookie sheet in the freezer, then bagged them up the next morning.
Soup (makes 7-8 servings):
4 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)
6 cups water
3 tsp chicken bouillon powder
4 cups pre-cooked shredded chicken
ground dried rosemary
onion powder
garlic powder
black pepper
12 oz bag frozen mixed vegetables (ours had green beans, peas, carrots & corn)
12-16 oz of fresh egg noodles
Directions:
Heat the stock, water, and bouillon powder over medium heat in a large stock pot until bubbling. Then add the chicken, seasonings, and vegetables, cook for about 6 minutes over medium, then add the noodles.
The noodles fattened up immediately after we added them--this was the moment where I realized I hadn't made them thin enough. I stirred the pot constantly for about 5-10 minutes, then turned off the heat, covered, and let it sit for about 10 minutes. The original recipe said they should only take about 2-4 minutes (Clue #2 that maybe I'd cut them too thick). They were also still tasting a bit bland after only 5-10 minutes so I wanted them to have a bit more time to soak up the chicken broth flavor. But maybe a consequence of my adding an extra egg was that they didn't want to absorb as much.
The extra sit time seemed to help with that, and they "deflated" a bit with time--I was worried that they would overcook but that wasn't an issue. In fact, in a few of the thicker ones when I bit into it, the center was still dry flour.
This is one of those dishes where it actually tastes better the next day. I had some leftovers over the weekend and the noodles were perfect at that point, had really soaked up a lot of that flavor. I'll play around with the cook time a bit with the other half of the batch that we froze. I definitely think we'll make these again--it was relatively low effort. I might try a different cut, like thin squares instead of the strips.
