French Onion Soup
So, I'm on work form home for a while and I've been making a lot more food than usual. But what's really been nice is that I can make food that takes a lot longer than usual because of it. Like really making a good onion soup. It takes a while. I don't know where this idea than you can caramelize onions properly in under an hour came from, but it's crap. This soup should take 2-3 hours to make properly. Longer if you can let it simmer for some time to intensify the flavors.
Here's what you need to get started:
- 2 pounds of onions and/or shallots
- For this batch I had about a pound of each, and the shallots I had were humorously large. - 1/3 cup oil
- I used canola because it's what I've got around, but really anything will work. Even butter and olive oil are fine since we're keeping the heat low. - 5 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 2 quarts of stock
- Beef is traditional, mushroom makes a good compliment or substitute, I'll discuss that more later. - A can of beer
- I can be whatever kind of beer you like or have on hand. I'd personally avoid sours, and any super hoppy IPAs. When in doubt buy a basic lager from your local brewery.
- Wine is traditional. I like beer better.
Alright, now that we have all of that, let's peel and slice these onions into rings. And most of the shallots I just give a rough dice.
The rings are about 3/8" in thickness. It's ok if they don't come apart yet.
Next we need to get these guys caramelizing. Like I said before, I have no idea where people get off saying 20-25 minutes for this.
As you can see, these don't even all fit in the bottom of the pan. And this is a 12" frying pan. 20 minutes my ass.
This, with that third cup of oil, spread it around as best you can, but it'll be tough. Low heat. I set my stovetop to 2 out of 10 for this.
Now go queue up your favorite 30-minute sitcom on Netflix. Watch an episode. If it was made in the last 30 years, that's 21 minutes. Now you can go and see how your onions are doing. They're probably just starting to get soft, and swimming in oil. This is good, push them around. As the cook they get soft, and the rings can be separated easily.
Go watch another episode.
Maybe at a good break point get up and stir them again, but they're probably not even turning brown yet. After this second episode, you probably have them maliable enough that they all can squeeze together on the bottom of the pan. Now you can turn the heat up to 3. And add the chopped garlic.
Go watch a third episode.
Though this time you should come in a couple of times and just make sure nothing is burning. After this episode you'll have had an hour of really slow caramelizing. It should look something like this:
Steal one, it should be soft and sweet and oily. That's perfect. If you want to add a little salt from here, go for it. Optionally, you can add some flour here to help bind up the oil. If you do, cook it long enough to get rid of the raw flour flavor, about 10 minutes.
Add the beer, and reduce it down to almost nothing. If you're still at 3, that's about 15-20 minutes. You can turn it up a little if you're in a hurry. But if you were in a hurry why are you making a recipe that I started out by saying takes 4 hours to make?
You're done with the hard part!
Now transfer this to a pot, add your stock, and let it simmer for another hour. Toast some bread, have some parmesean cheese, and you're good to go.
Of course, I said we'd talk about that stock though...
I have both beef and mushroom up there. That's for two reasons. First, I swap dishes with a friend who happens to be vegan, so I split the batch, and used 1/4 of the onions and 1/2 of the container of mushroom stock for that batch. Then I used the remainder of both and the whole beef stock for my own batch.
And the beef stock I used wasn't my preferred one. I tend to use College Inn for all my pre-made stock needs, that or the Nature's Promise ones from Stop an Shop. I don't particularly care for the added honey in the Kitchen Basics stock, but it was literally the last container of beef stock on the shelf thanks to all the stockpiling people are doing for social-distancing. Typically I wold have gone with the Bold Beef Stock. It's the one I've found comes out the closest to when I make it from scratch.
So I spent some time rebalancing the flavor, mostly more salt and a little nutritional yeast, I splashed in a little white wine vinegar for acidity to counter the honey.
Honestly, the vegan one came out better because it had better stock.
I've also done, on larger batches, 2:1 beef to chicken stock ratio, to help lighten the stock color and let the onions come through a little more. But this 2:1 beef to mushroom was pretty damn tasty.
If you let this simmer for 1-2 hours and let the flavors concentrate down it will be significantly better. It's even better the next day, as most soups and chilies are. I'm actually eating the second bowl as I type this, and it was definitely better than the one I had for dinner last night.
I know that I write recipes like I'm streaming on twitch, which I used to do. But food can be a storytelling medium. If you'd rather just see a basic ingredient let and method of prep, I can do that too. Just let me know.