Two questions: 1. How do I make plain, everyday cream of chicken? 2. How do I make standard chicken broth? These are two of the ingredients in Chicken & Dumplings and I just wanted to learn how to make them myself instead of buying them.

 How do you make cream of chicken soup? Oh, we are so proud of you! When we found out how much more flavor there is in homemade soup than canned, well, we were *.

That doesn't mean we don't have canned soup in our pantry, and that we don't occasionally reach for it. We live in the real world – or what we think of as the real world – and we have to make concessions sometimes. But if you can make soup from scratch, you will recognize that there's a great difference in flavor, and may be rendered *.

We've already given multiple recipes for Chicken Stock & Chicken Broth Variations (and Chicken Stock), so now we'll just tackle the Cream of Chicken (which relies on chicken stock, so you have to reverse the order of your questions, anyway.)

Cream of Chicken Soup can be as simple as adding chicken stock to a white sauce. It can be made by adding cream and cooked rice to chicken stock and puréeing it in a blender or puréeing it with a hand blender. It can be just chicken stock and cream.

The simplest Cream of Chicken Soup is 4 parts chicken stock to 1 part heavy cream or whipping cream, with a pinch of salt, white pepper, ground nutmeg, and/or a modest amount of chopped parsley or chives. Heat very gently (that is, don't come near the boil).

A little more involved – and producing a thicker soup – would be to melt 4 tablespoons of butter, mix with 4 tablespoons of flour, combine thoroughly and cook briefly over medium heat (you are trying to get rid of the taste of raw flour). Then stir in 4 cups of chicken stock and 1 cup of heavy cream or half-and-half, along with any of the seasonings mentioned in the preceding paragraph. This is actually a velouté – a white sauce made with stock instead of milk or cream.

If you want to add richness, you can mix in three beaten egg yolks (mix a little of the soup into the egg yolks to bring them up to temperature, then add them to the soup, quickly and thoroughly, so that you don't wind up with a variation of egg-drop-cream-of-chicken soup). You can also add a couple of tablespoons of almond flour per cup of soup to add thickness and richness.

If you want to add thickness through rice, add half a cup to a cup of boiled or steamed white rice to your 4 cups of chicken stock, purée like mad, and still add cream or half-and-half to give it richness.

Whatever process you follow, you need to remember that most canned cream of chicken soups are condensed by a factor of 2:1, and many recipes take that into account. So if you are preparing a Chicken & Dumplings recipe that calls for condensed soup, you'll have to figure out what to do. Either leave out the water called for or thicken your soup with twice as much roux, or more rice, or more almond flour. No matter what you do and in what proportion, though, it is likely to taste better than any chicken & dumplings you have ever had.

*speechless….

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