Cooking for Pleasure: French onion soup
- Patty Schied
- Jan 22
- 3 min read
Making winter foods while ready for spring
By Patty Schied
When I had my first taste of this soup in a French restaurant I was in college and thought I had never tasted anything so wonderful. Then when a small French bistro opened near my university, I would often go there just to have that soup.
This is a classic French recipe. Lots of onions are sliced, then cooked slowly in a heavy-duty soup pot on the stove until they are caramelized into a deep golden brown.
I was wondering lately why it had been years since I made this. I think it may be because slicing a large amount of onions can result in rivers of tears streaming down your face. When I looked up ways to prevent this from happening, one site suggested that I freeze them for 30 minutes. Lots of people said this really works. Others said that having a damp cloth near the cutting board or wearing goggles helps. But I forgot to freeze the onions, so I took the easy way out: I used my food processor.
No tears.
There are many different variations of this recipe. Some use quite a lot of brandy and wine, one even uses apple cider. I decided to follow Julia Child’s recipe and use only a cup of white wine. If you don’t want to use wine, make it without it. It will still be good. But just as important as the soup itself are the toasted French baguette slices with gruyere cheese baked into the soup. Then it becomes a full meal.
This soup isn’t difficult to make. It is merely time-consuming and requires that you carefully watch the onions as they slowly shrink in the pot, then start to turn brown.
Ingredients:
3 large or 5 medium onions, peeled and sliced into ¼ inch slices
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of oil
2 tablespoons of flour
Salt and pepper
1 ½ quarts of beef stock (I used Swanson’s.)
1 cup of white wine (I ended up using a mixture of white Vermouth and Pinot Grigio.)
One French baguette cut into ½ inch slices
Olive oil for drizzling on the bread
1 ½ cups of grated Swiss cheese (I used Gruyere.)
Directions:
Heat butter and oil in soup pot. Add sliced onions and slowly bring to medium heat. Cover for 20 minutes at medium low heat until they become translucent. Remove lid and heat to medium high, stirring until they caramelize (turn a deep brown). Be very careful not to burn. This step can take up to 30 minutes.
When the onions are caramelized, add flour and stir. Quickly add one cup of stock and stir to blend. Add remaining stock and wine and bring to a boil. Let simmer for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, drizzle oil on the bread slices and bake in a 325 oven for 15 minutes, then turn over and repeat.
Grate cheese and set aside.
Ladle soup into bake proof bowls. Place two pieces of toasted bread on top and sprinkle heavily with cheese. Place bowls on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven until the cheese is melted. This recipe makes six generous servings.
• Patty Schied is a longtime Juneau resident who studied at the Cordon Bleu in London and has written a cookbook. Cooking For Pleasure appears every other week in the Juneau Independent's features. She welcomes recipe ideas and questions about her column at patschied@yahoo.com.
