Yield – 4 or 5 portions
Nutritional Information is unavailable. This is a “pleasure dish” so if you are on any kind of restricted diet, well that sucks for you. I've been there.
Edibles:
| 4 lbs | red onions (as purchased weight – 2.9 lbs usable portion) |
| 2 lbs | sweet yellow onions (as purchased weight – 1.5 lbs usable portion) |
| 8 oz | fresh shallot (as purchased weight – 7.12 oz usable portion) |
| 4 ea | large cloves of garlic |
| 1 ea | bay leaf (fresh if you can get it) |
| 48 oz | hearty brown stock reduced by half (the 48 ounces is after reduction) |
| 6 oz | bacon fat, clarified (you shouldn’t need all of it, but it’s a judgement call) |
| 4 sprigs | fresh thyme |
| 8 fl oz | ruby port or sweet red wine with high alcohol content |
| 12 oz | gruyere, freshly grated |
| 1 ea | baguette, sliced into 1” thick rounds |
| To taste | kosher salt |
| To taste | fresh cracked black pepper |
Hardware:
- 1, 5 quart (or there abouts) enameled dutch oven or stainless steel pot
- 4, 16 fluid ounce ceramic, oven safe serving vessels
- 1 mandolin (optional – but either have a cutting glove or lots of band-aids, sterile suturing supplies and someone with some sort of medical field training close by)
- An oven with a broiler or a salamander or a blowtorch. Your call.
Summary:
This is a really easy recipe in many ways. Easy to prep, easy to serve, and easy to screw up, so keep that in mind. The key to this dish, honestly is patience, which is hard to come by these days. If made from scratch, it is a slow dish. You have to make brown stock, you have to reduce the stock, you have to slowly caramelize the onions, and while there are some shortcuts that may be made, I personally wouldn’t do it. It defeats the purpose of the dish, which has more to do with the cooking than the eating.
Remember, this is how I do it. What you do is up to you.
Steps:
- If I haven’t reduced my stock yet, this is a really good time to do so while I prep. If I have, I leave it on low heat while everything else is happening.
- I slice my onions as thinly as I can. This is the only step that will speed up the process in accordance with the Nature of this dish. I do this so the onions will give up their sugar faster as more surface area is exposed to fat and heat. I could do this on my mandolin, but frankly I only use that as a last resort. I enjoy using my knife and my mandolin is of the devil and demands blood.
- I slice the shallots and garlic after the onions and set them aside.
- I fire up my enameled dutch oven instead of my cast iron one as I don’t like the way the iron leaches into the soup. When a water droplet skitters across the pot and vanishes, it’s hot enough to add the bacon fat. I start with 3 ounces.
- When the bacon fat is completely melted, I swish it around the pot as best I can, covering the entire bottom, going up the sides a bit. This is a sticky dish.
- I add the onions in three batches. When I add the first round of onions and maybe stand back a bit as it can get a bit splattery. I ignore the onions for a couple minutes while I sample the wine not reserved for deglazing. What I’m looking for is browning (not burning) on the onions before I start turning them. I give them a good stir about once every two minutes, exposing as much of the non-browned bits to the bottom of the pan as I can.
- When the volume of the onions has reduced enough to add the second batch of onions, I lower the heat to half and add the second batch of onions. I want to keep them in long pieces, so I stir them in gently. I continue ignoring them at two-minute intervals.
- When the second round of onions is reduced in volume, I pause to examine what’s happening in the cooking vessel with my eyes and my nose. If the onions seem dry or smell burned or are browning too quickly, I’ll make a well in the center of the pot and add more bacon fat. When the fat melts, I add the last batch of onions and mix in to coat with the fat. If I don’t need the fat I stay the course and add the onions.
- What I am looking for is color. The new onions will very readily start to adopt the ruddy-brown hues of the onions that are already breaking down, but that doesn’t mean they are caramelizing. It means their moisture is coming out and dissolving what’s already been done and are basically being well, sugar coated. I’m usually about 40 minutes into the process at this point. That’s when I add my garlic, shallots, thyme and bay leaf.
- I let that go for another 10 minutes or so until the last of the onions are breaking down and caramelizing and the other two batches look a lot like really thin, dark earthworms. I will then be counterintuitive and start removing my onions to the pot of reduced stock, not the other way around.
- When the pot is cleared of onions, I’ll let the pot liquor cook down, to almost dry without burning. I’ll kill the heat and add my wine to deglaze the pan.
- When everything is dissolved and the wine is starting to cook off, I’ll add my proto-soup from the stock pot, give it a stir, bring it to a boil, cover, reduce heat to a low simmer and let it do it’s thing for about 45 minutes.
While things are simmering, I’ll start slicing up my baguette into one-inch-thick slices and grating my cheese. Depending on my mood, the freshness of the bread, how much wine I’ve had, I may or may not toast the rounds. Usually if the bread was baked that day, I’ll leave the slices unmolested by heat until the time of broiling. I do enjoy serving this with fresh baguette slices with enough butter to make a cardiologist get twitchy.
A couple quick notes about why I do what I do. First up, the port or high alcohol sweet red wine. I go with a ruby port for two reasons. Number one, I like the high alcohol content to aid in the dissolving of the crusties in the pan and liberating the volatile organic compounds not soluble in fat or water. It makes my nose happy. The other reason is because onions vary in sugar content and the port is insurance in case the onions just don’t bring the sweetness.
Another note is that when I make this, it’s almost always of smoked turkey stock. My turkeys are brined and as such, impart a fair amount of seasoning to any stock I make with them. This is why I haven’t added any salt or pepper to the soup. That comes before service which is the next step.
- When the time of the simmering is complete, I move an oven rack to as high as I can get it in my oven and still have room for my crockery. I then crank the oven to broil. I will also put a half sheet pan on the bottom rack to catch any drippies.
- With the oven doing its thing, I taste my soup and start thinking about seasoning. I’m looking for a balance of salt, sweetness, stickiness (from the stock) and floral notes from the thyme. I’ll also pick out the thyme stems.
Typically, and I know this is a little over the top, but I don’t want to bugger up an entire batch of soup, so I’ll use pour off a little soup into a measuring cup and adjust the seasoning there. This will let me know exactly what I need to add to the pot so I can skip the “hit or miss” risk factor to my entire pot of soup.
- Satisfied with my seasoning adjustments, I will ready my four serving vessels by ladling in my soup, leaving enough headspace at the top for my bread (croutons) and cheese.
- On the top of the soup, I float the bread (croutons), usually two layers of two because bread and texture are their own rewards. I then will add two or three ounces of Gruyere on top of the bread, not being overly cautious about the cheese overhanging the rim. It’s a bitch to clean, but people love that effect.
- The crocks go onto a sheet pan and are placed under the broiler until I am satisfied with the melt to scorching ratio on the cheese. Honestly it’s like roasting marshmallows. Some people like them slightly tan and melty, others like to set them on fire. My sweet spot is little black tips on the melting cheese, bubbling soup on the edges and set cheese drippings on the side of the crock. You do you.
As mentioned previously, I typically like to serve this with heavily buttered baguette slices. That means my crock and the bread are sitting together on a plate. If you have to move that plate anywhere, get a paper towel, moisten it and lay it flat in the middle of the plate. Place your crock right on the towel and your bread around the crock. This will keep the crock from sliding around during transport. Yay, surface tension!
So that’s how I do it.
For me, this dish is all about sensuality. The texture of the onions, the silky melted cheese, the coarseness of the bread, the gelatin of the stock and the overall richness of the individual elements combined. For me, nothing says comfort food more than French onion soup. Well maybe grilled cheese and tomato soup, but that’s a different post.
Happy cooking, ya’ll.
ADC
