Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Pot Pie

I love Southern food. I love the shrimp and grits, the low country boils, the hush puppies. I love all of it. But there's just something that no one - no one (not even Southerners) - outside of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania gets right. And that's chicken pot pie. Real chicken pot pie doesn't have a flaky crust nor is it baked in a pie dish or some other baking dish. Real chicken pot pie is more like a delicious stew than anything resembling a pie. It has thick, doughy pasta squares (made from scratch, mind you!) and usually some kind of vegetable, like carrots, but really the dough here is the star of the show. And it is delicious.

I grew up on this stuff. It was tradition in my family. No dinner was as exciting as dinners when chicken pot pie was served. I remember my grandma spending hours in the kitchen to make this scrumptious meal and every second was worth it!

And lately, I've been craving comfort foods, so I thought I'd give chicken pot pie a whirl in my own kitchen. For the first time, I carried on the tradition of my grandmother and my mom (and I'm pretty sure my great grandmother, too), and made my own batch of chicken pot pie. It took about 4 hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but oh my, it was so, so, so worth it and every bit as delicious as I remembered.

Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Pot Pie

I followed this recipe and it was definitely right on.

I'm thinking that this year's Thanksgiving turkey leftovers are going to morph into some kind of turkey pot pie, maybe with peas instead of carrots or even topped with hot cranberries. And because I'm trying to eat as many whole, clean foods as possible, I'd like to try making the dough with whole wheat flour instead of white flour. Who knows? Maybe I'll start my own turkey pot pie tradition.