French Onion Soup
I bought a 3 lb. bag of onions a couple weeks ago for my chicken stock. I only used a couple, then I was left with a sack of onions that may be going bad in my root cellar AKA the bottom drawer of my kitchen cabinet. So I needed to use all the onions fast. The only recipe I could think of was French Onion Soup.
I’ve never made it but if its a soup its got to be easy: onions, broth, bread, and cheese. Now how to you put it all together? I took my inspiration from the Pioneer Woman’s recipe for French Onion Soup, Serious Eats’ recipe for the Best French Onion Soup, and Good Dinner Mom’s French Onion Soup.
Caramelizing the onions is the key to this soup. I followed the Pioneer Woman’s suggestion and roasted it in my dutch oven in the oven. Serious Eats is correct when they say that enameled cast iron doesn’t brown the onions. I was lucky that the sack onions was yellow onions as Good Dinner Mom recommends. So I started the onions on the stove top with a mixture of EVOO and butter.
I sliced them in my hand mandolin, threw them in the pot with some pinches of salt, and let cook for about 30 minutes. I wanted them to start going translucent while I heated the oven to 400F.
Once at that temperature I put the whole pot into the oven for a cooking time of about an hour. Half-way through I stirred the onions because they were starting to get burnt in spots.
At the end of the hour, I finished it off on the stove. I would spend another 10 minutes getting the onions to be brown. I turned off the stove and added a cup of cooking sherry to deglaze the bits and pieces stuck on the bottom of the pot. I would reduce this mixture and I added 3 gloves of minced garlic and some fresh ground black pepper. This would take another 10 minutes to reduce.
Actually, while all this was going I was heating up whatever chicken stock I had in my house. There was stock I had made a few weeks ago and I had some other in the cupboard. It was only 5 cups, so I finished it off with three extra cups of water to make it 8 cups or 2 quarts of broth. As I heated it up I added some ground pepper.
When the onions looked ready, I added the broth into the pot. I used it to deglaze the pot again so that all the good bits and pieces were in the pot. I added a few twigs of fresh thyme and a bay leaf and let it simmer for 30 minutes. I also added the secret ingredient of few dashes of fish sauce.
Grated gruyere and well toasted sourdough bread finished off the soup.
I must say the time it takes to make this soup — about 3 hours — is worth it. Hopefully, it tastes good at lunch tomorrow.
