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The regional table / North Dakota

Knoephla Soup

Published September 23, 2026 · North Dakota

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The broth is easy. The dumpling is where every cook in this state stops agreeing with every other.

The dish has no settled spelling, and that is the first honest thing to say about it. The North Dakota State Library has digitised sixty-five of the state's community cookbooks into the Prairie Recipes collection on Digital Horizons, all of them marked No Copyright, and the word appears there five different ways. Knepfla turns up on eighteen pages, knephla on nine, knefla on three, and knoephla — the spelling every café menu in Bismarck now uses — on exactly two. Knoefla makes two more. The Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at North Dakota State University, which is the archive the dish belongs to, files three recipes for it under two spellings on one page. And the state's own book has none of them: the Federal Writers' Project guide of 1938, which describes Russo-German dress, house paint, the Christmas Angels and the sunflower seed they called the Russian peanut, never prints the word under any spelling, nor borscht, nor fleischkuechle. It does record the country, though — the Russo-Germans "first came to this State about 1889, settling in the south-central section, in McIntosh and Emmons Counties", and made up 12.8 percent of the population when the guide went to press.

What the archives do settle is the dumpling, by disagreeing about it in a way that is more useful than agreement would be. Four methods are on the record, all of them from North Dakota kitchens. The Wolford community cookbook of 2005 rolls the dough into half-inch ropes and cuts half-inch pieces straight into the simmering soup. Barbara Gross, in a recipe GRHC took from the Napoleon Care Center Cook Book, makes a softer dough and cuts it "into small pieces with scissors" over the pot. Grandma Julia Messer's knoephles, sent in to GRHC from Florida, are stiffer and go in by the spoonful: "Drop by spoonfuls into boiling water. When they float, they're done." And Arlene Isaak, whose recipe went to the Bismarck Tribune on 12 November 2003, does not make them at all — "Knoepfla dough can be purchased frozen; it is a type of German dumpling. I like to use a spaetzle dough, which is more like noodles." Rope-and-cut is the method below, because it is the only one that gives every dumpling the same thickness, and thickness is the whole of whether it cooks through before the outside goes to paste.

Why this version works

Rope and cut, not drop. A dropped spoonful is fat in the middle and thin at the edges, so the edges are mush by the time the middle is done. A half-inch rope cut into half-inch pieces gives you a pot of dumplings that are all the same across, and they finish together. The scissors method gets you most of the way there and is faster; it is worth knowing for a weeknight.

Cream at the end, off the boil. Every documented version finishes with dairy — milk in the Napoleon recipe, a cup of cream in the Bismarck Tribune one. It goes in after the dumplings are cooked and the pot is off a rolling boil. Cream held at a boil in a starchy, salty broth breaks, and once it has broken there is nothing to be done with it.

Baking powder, and a rest of exactly none. This is a chemically raised dumpling, not a yeasted one. The powder starts working the moment the liquid goes in, so the dough is mixed, rolled, cut and in the pot inside ten minutes. Dough left sitting on the board spends its lift on the counter and boils up dense.

Waxy potatoes in the broth, and they do the thickening. NDSU Extension puts the rule plainly in Potatoes from Garden to Table: cultivars with a waxy texture are "lower in starch content and specific gravity" and "hold together better during boiling", which is why the bulletin recommends them for soups and stews. Red-skinned potatoes keep their edges in a pot that simmers for half an hour. A russet dissolves and thickens the soup into wallpaper paste, which is a different and worse dish.

Ingredient notes

Broth: six cups of chicken broth. Use low-sodium, because the dough carries its own salt and the soup reduces while the dumplings cook. The old recipes reach for bouillon cubes and chicken base and there is no shame in it, but then salt the dough and nothing else until the end.

Cream: a cup and a half of heavy cream, or half cream and half whole milk for a lighter pot. Skim milk will not carry this soup; the dumplings and the potato already supply the body, and what the cream is there for is the fat.

Flour: plain all-purpose. Bread flour makes a dumpling that fights the spoon. Measure by scooping and levelling rather than packing the cup, because a heavy cup of flour is the commonest cause of a leaden knoephla.

Potatoes: a pound and a half of red-skinned or other waxy potatoes, cut in half-inch dice. Cut them smaller than feels right; they are meant to be one bite alongside the dumpling, not a separate course.

Step by step

  1. Start the broth. Melt the butter in a large pot over medium heat and cook the onion, celery and carrot 8 minutes, until soft and not coloured. Add the broth, the potatoes, the bay leaves, 1 teaspoon of the salt and the pepper, and bring to a simmer.
  2. Simmer the potatoes. Cook 12 to 15 minutes, until a potato cube gives to a knife but still holds a square edge. Keep the pot at a lazy simmer; a hard boil rounds them off.
  3. Mix the dough. While the potatoes cook, whisk the flour, baking powder and remaining salt. Beat the eggs with the milk, pour them in and stir to a stiff, slightly tacky dough. Do not knead it beyond the point where it comes together.
  4. Rope and cut. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured board, divide it in four and roll each piece into a rope about half an inch thick. Cut the ropes into half-inch pieces with a floured knife or a pair of kitchen scissors, letting them fall straight into the simmering pot as you go.
  5. Cook the dumplings. Simmer 12 to 15 minutes after the last piece goes in. They swell, rise and go from chalky to translucent at the corners. Cut one open at 12 minutes: there should be no wet seam through the middle.
  6. Finish off the heat. Pull the pot off the burner, fish out the bay leaves, and stir in the cream and the parsley. Let it stand 5 minutes before serving — it thickens noticeably as it sits, and it will thicken again in the fridge.
If the soup has gone to glue, the potatoes were starchy or the dumplings were overworked; thin it with hot broth a half cup at a time rather than water, which dilutes the salt along with the starch. If the dumplings are heavy, the flour was packed into the cup or the dough sat on the board — next time mix it while the potatoes simmer and get it into the pot inside ten minutes. If the cream has split into curds and liquid, the pot was still boiling: it cannot be put back together, but the soup is still good, and serving it over the broken texture is better than trying to whisk it and making it worse.

Storage and make-ahead

Three days refrigerated, and it sets almost solid overnight because the dumplings go on drinking. Reheat gently with a splash of broth stirred through, over low heat, stopping short of a boil so the cream holds.

It does not freeze well as a finished soup — the potatoes go grainy and the cream separates. What does freeze is the broth and dumplings without the cream: freeze that flat in a bag, thaw, reheat and add the cream fresh.

What to serve with it

Buttered bread and nothing else is the honest answer, and it is what the cookbooks assume. If you want something on the side, make it sharp and cold against all that cream — dill cucumbers, pickled beets, or a plain cabbage slaw with vinegar. Beer suits it better than wine.

From the recipe box / North Dakota

Knoephla Soup

Little flour dumplings cut off a rope and dropped into a thick potato and cream broth — the soup of German-Russian North Dakota, and a dish whose whole argument is how the dumpling gets into the pot.

Prep
25 min
Cook
35 min
Total
1 hr
Serves
6
Calories
570 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Soften the onion, celery and carrot in the butter 8 minutes, then add the broth, potatoes, bay leaves, 1 teaspoon salt and the pepper and bring to a simmer.
  2. Simmer 12–15 minutes, until the potatoes give to a knife but keep their edges.
  3. Whisk 2 cups flour, the baking powder and the remaining 1½ teaspoons salt; stir in the eggs beaten with the milk to make a stiff dough.
  4. Roll the dough into ½-inch ropes on a floured board and cut ½-inch pieces straight into the simmering pot.
  5. Simmer 12–15 minutes more, until the dumplings have risen and no wet seam shows when one is cut open.
  6. Off the heat, discard the bay leaves and stir in the cream and parsley. Stand 5 minutes before serving.

Nutrition

Fat33 g (20 g saturated)
Sodium1080 mg
Protein12 g
Servingabout 1½ cups
Calories570
Cholesterol145 mg
Carbohydrates55 g (5 g sugar, 4 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Is it knoephla, knepfla or knephla?

All of them, and more. Across the sixty-five North Dakota community cookbooks digitised into the Prairie Recipes collection, knepfla leads with eighteen pages and knephla has nine, while knoephla — the spelling the restaurants settled on — appears on two. There is no correct one; the dish is older in these kitchens than any decision about how to write it down.

Is this the same as cheese buttons?

No, though the same word covers both. Kase knepfla — cheese buttons — are squares of dough filled with dry curd cheese, sealed, boiled and browned, and the Grace Baptist Church Jubilee Cookbook of 1979 from Gackle prints one. That is a filled dumpling and a relative of the Mennonite verenike; the soup dumpling here is plain dough and nothing else.

Why are my dumplings gummy in the middle?

They were too thick, or they went into water that was not moving. A half-inch rope is the limit for a twelve-minute simmer; anything fatter needs longer, and by then the outsides have dissolved. Keep the pot at a steady simmer with bubbles breaking, not a still, cooling broth.

Can I use the scissors instead of rolling ropes?

Yes, and a good many cooks here do. Make the dough a shade softer, hold it over the pot and snip small pieces in with wet scissors. You get less uniform dumplings and a slightly cloudier broth, and you save five minutes. Barbara Gross's recipe in the GRHC files works exactly this way.