Add 2 quarts (8 cups) of no salt added chicken stock or broth along with chicken, onion, carrots, celery, Herb Ox bouillon and bay leaf into a large pot. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer 50-60 minutes or until chicken is fork tender.
When finished cooking, remove chicken and vegetables from broth to large bowl or platter. Discard any skin or bones and chop or shred chicken.
In a medium bowl, combine flour, no sodium baking powder and shortening. Cut shortening into flour using a fork, pastry cutter or potato masher.
Pour in about 1/2 cup of the milk, reserving the remaining. Using a spatula mix it all together making sure to scrape down the sides and bottom. Your dough will be fairly sticky and shaggy, add more milk or flour if required.
Dust your rolling surface with a generous amount of flour. Place dough on floured surface and dust top with more flour. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out to about 1/8” to 1/4″ thick. Roll from the center out. Sprinkle more flour on the dough as necessary if it starts sticking to the rolling pin.
Using a knife or pizza cutter, cut out dumplings into squares or rectangles a little over an 1" wide. They don’t need to be perfectly shaped.
Bring chicken broth up to a low boil. Begin adding dumplings one at a time so they don’t stick together. Stir while adding them into the boiling chicken broth.
Allow dumplings to cook for about 5-10 minutes. Then add back the chicken and vegetables. Stir to combine, reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes. Broth will thicken as the dumplings soak up the broth. Taste test a dumpling, it should not have a doughy taste when done.
Towards the end of cooking, if you want or need a little thicker broth, you can thicken the broth with a little bit of cornstarch and water once the dumplings are cooked. Dumplings soak up a lot of broth so be sure to wait till the end.
Notes
One of the great things about this recipe is you can use just about any chicken cut you want. Even chicken thighs or chicken with bone. Bones will of course need removal and discarded before re-adding chicken to pot. Bones will actually give the broth more flavor too.