Note: These dumplings are intended to be served with gravy (as opposed to dumplings intended to be served in a soup).

Note: These dumplings are intended to be served with gravy (as opposed to dumplings intended to be served in a soup).

Preparation:

• Cut the bread into pieces and put it in a large bowl.
• Heat the milk until it is hot, but not boiling. Add the hot milk to the bowl with the bread.
• Cover the bowl and wait 20 minutes.
• Add the flour, corn starch, egg (with shell removed) and parsley.
  • Hint: For the cooking stage, you will need a large pot of boiling water. If you start the water boiling now, you will save some time.
• Add salt and pepper to taste. Be generous with the salt.
• Take a small handfull of the mixture and form it into a ball. Repeat until all the mixture has been formed into balls of approximately the same size.
  • If you wet your hands with cold water, the dough will not stick to your hands and you can form the balls easier. Don't drip water into the bowl, as this will make the mixture soggy.

Cooking:

Heat a large pot of water to boiling point. The pot should be big enough to hold all the dumplings and still have room for the dumplings to move about. Gently add the dumpling balls to the boiling water. The water will stop boiling; wait until it starts to simmer again and then turn down the temperature until the water is just lightly simmering.

For this recipe, I make about 16 dumplings, each about 5cm (2 inches) wide. Once the water is simmering, they take 15-20 minutes to cook. If you make the dumplings smaller then they cook faster and if you make them larger they need more time to cook.

After about 15 minutes, remove one ball and cut it in half. If it looks fluffy in the center, then it is cooked and you can remove all the dumplings. If it looks wet and does not have a fluffy appearance, then discard it and let the others cook for several more minutes before removing them.

Serve the dumplings with gravy.

For this recipe, one needs to use corn starch rather than corn flour. The difference between the two is that corn flour is simply ground up dried corn (typically used to make tortillas and certain other flour products) whereas corn starch is from the endosperm (the white heart) of the corn kernel (typically used as a thickening agent). Corn starch is largely tasteless, unlike corn flour, so using corn flour will give an off taste to the dumplings. In the UK and some commonwealth countries, the term corn flour is othen used to mean corn starch, so a packet of corn starch may well be labeled corn flour.

If the dumplings fall apart while cooking, you've used too little corn starch. If they are hard after cooking, then you've used too much. If you are making the recipe for the first time, you could try cooking just one dumpling first and if it doesn't turn out, adjust the amount of ingredients accordingly.

To make this recipe for 4 people instead of 8, just half the ingredients.

If you have too many dumplings, you can store them in the fridge overnight in a covered bowl. Then simply slice them and fry them in butter to warm them up the next day; if you have some left-over gravy then this makes a good side-dish.

A nice variation of this recipe is to lightly cook some bacon bits and mix them in with the other ingredients.