French Onion Soup... need recipe fast

Cafe Society
1

I decided to revive my family tradition of making Beef Fondue for New Year’s Eve. I haven’t had it i about 20 years or so. It has been driving me crazy though about what to serve with it other than the basic Baked Potato. I finally remembered that we always had French Onion Soup. I could probably get it pretty close with Beef Broth, Onions, some Sherry, some kind of toasted bread, and Swiss or Gruyere but I want to make it as special as possible and I’m afraid I’m forgetting something.

Sure I could do a Google search but the recipes can be hit or miss. And you can never trust the ratings since someone will post that the omitted the onions and it sucked and give it one star. I’d rather trust the Dopers to show me the way. I’ll wing it if nobody has a recipe, but if there is one you swear by I’d love to see it.

2

Sorry, I don’t have specific amounts or even ingredients but here’s what I do.

I take thin sliced onions, leeks, shallots, and scallions. I cut across the slices to form strings (except for the scallions). I only use the white and light green part of the scallion. Those get lightly sautéed along with some crushed garlic. Then I add chicken broth to the vegetables, it’s great if I have real broth but stuff like Swanson’s will do. Season with fresh parsley diced very fine, not too much, and black pepper, and then whatever I think will go well with it (if I already have the broth from soup I’ll just leave in the vegetables that are there). It needs to be simmered for a while, the strings should be soft and swollen, but not falling apart. I use toasted English muffins to cover in coffee mug, then heap on gruyere, swiss, and parmesan, and any other good flavorful cheese on hand. Bake it in the oven at 350F until the top of the cheese browns. You want the mug pretty full, the muffin will soak up broth and not increase the volume much, and the cheese should melt out over the sides of the mug. Check the oven as they heat to make sure the cheese doesn’t brown too fast, it has to melt first and then develop a nice golden brown color on top.

3

Qadgop the Mercotan’s Homemade French Onion Soup of the Gods.

StG

4

Haven’t made it in a long time, but it was my go-to French onion soup recipe for many years. From the Silver Palate Cookbook, it’s pretty simple and straightforward:

4 TB butter
2 TB olive oil
6 cups sliced yellow onions
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sugar
1/3 cup Cognac
1 TB Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp dried thyme
3 TB all-purpose flour
3 quarts beef stock
1 1/2 cups dry white wine
salt and pepper to taste

Heat butter and oil in a large stock pot. Add onions and cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. Add the garlic and sugar. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are golden brown, about 40 minutes.

Pour in Cognac, warm it and flame with a match. When the flames subside, add the mustard and thyme. Stir in the flour and cook, stirring frequently, for 3 minutes.

Gradually stir in the stock and wine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Simmer uncovered for 1 hour.

Croutons:

8 thick slices French bread
4 TB butter at room temperature
4 TB olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced

spread one side of each bread slice with 1 1/2 tsp butter and 1 1/2 tsp oil. Sprinkle with the garlic. Toast the prepared side only on a baking sheet until crusty and golden, 12-15 minutes.

Cheese Gratinee:

8 oz shredded Gruyere
8 oz shredded smoked mozzarella
4 oz grated Parmesan

Combine the 3 cheeses.

To assemble:

Preheat broiler. Ladle hot soup into 8 oven-proof soup bowls to fill three-fourths full. Float a crouton in the center of each bowl. Top each bowl generously with the cheese mixture. Broil 6 inches from the heat until the cheese is melted and bubbling, about 4-5 minutes. Serve immediately.

Hope you enjoy it, if you decide to use it!

5

Thanks for the ideas… I actually have bowls that I use for French Onion Soup (see the thread about me having too many kitchen gadgets) but I haven’t used them in some time.

I’m curious about using Chicken Broth over Beef Broth. Again, I haven’t made it in years and I haven’t looked up any recipes but I picture it with a darker base.

And, no problem with not having measurements. I can do the basics… just wanted to make sure I’m not missing something important (like chicken broth instead of beef or something).

ETA… this response was to Tri Polar.

6

You can use a mix of half fond brun and half chicken stock, or just the fond if you like it really dark (I do). This would be a proper fond made with roasted bones, beef and mirepoix (or the best packaged equivalent - I use a local brand called NOMU)

To me the secret is getting a good caramelization of the onions, and that means sauteing them slooooowly. Oh, and a tsp sugar doesn’t hurt either.

7

Good caramelization is the key, but I prefer the high heat method. I cook at somewhere between medium-high and high heat, adding a little bit of water at a time to keep it from burning. It does require constant attention doing it this way, but only takes about 15-20 minutes (and I personally feel it has better flavor than the slow-cooked versions.) I don’t use sugar, but I do use a bit of salt to draw out moisture, and I prefer yellow onions to sweet onions like Vidalia or Walla Wallas.

8

Wow! How have I missed this other world of French Onion soup all these years? I never considered it a hearty meal, just a lighter precursor to a big meal. Well this is great, I was beginning to think I had no more frontiers in the pursuit of life’s second greatest pleasure, now I have something to look forward to.

9

You might want to consider cooking the onions in the oven like Qadgop suggests; you get more gentle and even heat that way, and you’re less likely to burn them or otherwise mess them up.

http://www.food.com/recipe/best-french-onion-soup-americas-test-kitchen-493446

10

You can’t burn them if you do them low and slow. I do mine more-or-less like this, usually with a little sugar and balsamic at the end (onion marmalade, effectively). If you’re doing it too fast, you not really caramelizing them, IMO, just browning them. They don’t turn out properly jammy that way - the sugars are all caramelized at the surface, not inside the cells of the onion. Others haveeven strongeropinions about that.

Quadgop’s method sounds good, too.

11

I looked at your article, and it’s really dependent on your particular stove. I suspect “Medium” on a lot of stoves would be too high.

That’s why ovening them would be great- uniform, even heat. Much the same reason Alton Brown advocates doing roux in the oven.

12

I know I’m late to the game here, but our Costco has a frozen French onion soup that is pretty good. (Used to be outstanding but they changed the recipe.) It comes in frozen blobs that you put into an ovenproof bowl and heat for an hour.

13

You should see this rebuttal.

I do high heat caramelized onions as a rule. They caramelize better (in my opinion) than the slow cooked onions. They are brown all the way through and jammy. Seriously. One of Madhur Jaffrey’s books on Indian cooking has similar advice of caramelizing onions over high heat. Now, I’m not saying it’s the only way or the way, but it’s a perfectly good way and it is caramelized all the way through if you do it correctly. My timeframe is more like 15-20 minutes, as I use a little bit of water through the process to help build up the fond, and I don’t cover the pan or use a pinch of sugar like he does. I can’t remember where I learned that, but it was a French chef technique that I had read about somewhere for French onion soup: full high heat, stirring, and adding water to keep things from burning, and to develop a flavorful, rich fond for the soup.

14

There is a site: www.allrecipes.com

Any time I need a recipe for anything, it always seems to come through for me.

Give it a try and let us know what you find?

Another great site is www.ask.com where you can ask most any question and it is weirdly uncanny in the way it finds answers to those questions. I asked it to find me a recipe for Onion Soup. Here is a link:

http://index.about.com/index?gclid=CjwKEAiAoJmlBRCxjKeizPHVs1ESJAC6cxjUfCiId0wfp3vuUdSrk4G9ehtY7r-Ow7ikr4KAZRnXcRoCxrjw_wcB&am=broad&q=how+to+make+onion+soup&an=google_s&askid=18811697-d649-4d7d-b9f7-1e2a7415c298-0-ab_gsb&dqi=&qsrc=999&ad=semD&o=4960&l=sem

And another one:

http://www.ask.com/web?am=broad&q=recipe+for+french+onion+soup&an=google_s&askid=09a41bb3-6a11-4312-86e1-733156dceca7-0-us_gsb&kv=sdb&gc=0&dqi=&qsrc=999&ad=semD&o=11581&l=dir&af=&_=1

The following three sites represent the best when it comes to giving you answers for the things you need:

about.com, answers.com and ask.com

Good luck!

I hope you enjoy your soup.

:slight_smile:

15

I’ll use chicken broth when I want a lighter base, although I usually prefer a darker base from beef broth. But I’d heard that the ancient way, if no longer traditional, is to just use onions, thoroughly caramelized and no meat broth at all. This link goes to an example: Classic French Onion Soup (No Stock) | Alexandra's Kitchen FWIW, when I’ve tried it by my own devices, it never really becomes full flavored enough.

16

I actually use chicken broth as well, myself, most of the time. The recipe a couple posts back where I mentioned reading somewhere about the French chef caramelizing onions over high heat, adding water a bit at a time–that recipe was like what Arkcon mentioned, using only water and no stock. Also, like Arkcon, I found that to be a tad too light in flavor, at least with the onions I can find around here, so I switched up to homemade chicken broth (just a light broth, not a full-powered roasted chicken stock or anything, and nothing too concentrated. Just enough to add a little lift to the base flavor.) Apparently, there is some support to this idea. It just depends what you’re going for. Beef stock makes it richer, water or chicken stock makes it lighter and has the onion flavor shining through more.

17

The recipe I have always used calls for the onions to be caramlized in bacon fat and butter. So I start off frying half a dozen fatty rashers of bacon in a bit of butter. Once they are crisp I take them out and add a bit more butter and the onions. Usually I use more than one variety of onions and often throw in the onion’s smarter brother the leek. While tho onions are doing their thing I get a hunk of the baguette and make myself a huge bacon sandwich. This works fine because I do this early in the day and then use my slow cooker to cook the soup for 6 hours or so.

18

Incidentally, today I was caramelizing onions for some French onion soup, and here you can see what they look like using the “burner always on high” method:

At the 12.5 minute mark
At 20 minutes.

This was with enough onions to go up about 1/3-1/2 of the way up the Dutch oven, so no single layer. (If caramelzing a batch in a single layer, you can easily do it in 10 minutes, as the video I posted before shows, but I wanted to check if my 15-20 minute estimate I made for my method in a Dutch oven where you have too many onions for a single layer was accurate.) They are jammy and caramelized all the way through.

19

Damn that looks good.

20

Can I drop by for a bowl?

Turns out I didn’t make it after all. I thought there would be five of us for dinner but after I found out my kids had already made plans it became just the wife and I. Then my wife reminded me that the last time she had it she got very ill and didn’t really have a taste for it anymore. It didn’t quite seem worth the effort to make one bowl for me. I still have all the ingredients so hopefully there will be another opportunity soon.