French Onion Soup

Making French onion soup is a little time consuming but it's easy and the results are spectacular.   My recipe draws heavily from Alton Brown's and I think you'll like it a lot.  It's easily customized based on what you have lying around.  Obviously, it has to have onions in it but the alcohol, stock and herb mixture could totally be varied. I like my soup to have an awful lot of onions in it.  Julia Child's soup has a lot fewer onions--  so much so that she thickened hers with flour and even cornstarch as well in one of the enrichments.    I've been experimenting with stock and have concluded that, although you can never go wrong with a delicious homemade stock, this soup is more about the onions and the wine than the stock so packaged works just fine. 

Caramelize the onions.  Add to a heavy pot:

4 pounds onions
1/4 cup butter
1 tsp salt

Turn the heat to medium and cover.  Leave it alone for 20 minutes and then uncover and stir. Turn the heat down and keep stirring occasionally until the onions are caramelized and delicious.  The onions will release a variable amount of liquid and it will have a variable amount of evaporation depending on the humidity in the room.  I find that the best way to cook them is to vary covered and uncovered cooking.  If the onions are sitting in liquid they aren't going to caramelize and if they get too dry then they will start to stick.  Don't rush the caramelization process.  Expect it to take a couple of hours or maybe even more.  Rushing it will leave you with burned onions that are bitter and nobody likes that.  Alton Brown dispenses with all of this nonsense and caramelizes in the oven.  Whichever way you cook them, after a couple of hours when they look perfect add:

Two cups of white wine

let that reduce until the alcohol has burned off and you've been able to scrape all of the brown bits that were stuck to the pan up.  Then add:

4 cups beef stock
12 oz beer
Bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, bay leaves) tied together with twine on unflavored dental floss.

Simmer uncovered for an hour.  If it starts to get too thick add another bottle of beer.  Remove bouquet garni and season with

Salt and pepper to taste.

Dry out some

One loaf french bread

In the oven until very dry and lightly toasted.  Ladle soup into a bowl, top with toast and then

8 oz shredded gruyere, swiss or a combination of the two.

Mound a generous amount of cheese on top of the toast in the bowl and run under the broiler until golden and bubbly.  This is the classic method of serving this soup but a lot of people don't like it because 1) the toast eventually becomes very soggy and some people don't like that and 2) it tends to be more of a commitment to cheese than people want to make.  I think a nice compromise is to put the the cheese on top of the toast and run it under the broiler and then serve them on the side.  Purists can just pop the cheese toast into their soup in its entirety and eat it like that.  My mom liked it that way and I didn't notice any outraged Frenchmen storming the house to protest what I'd done to La Cuisine.

Bon appetit!