Classic French Onion Soup

i'm chef frank this is proto cooks and today we're making french onion soup i remember french onion soup from my childhood i'm a child of the 70s and 80s and basically once a month my dad would make french onion soup they were really into food they used to get gourmet magazine i remember reading gourmet magazine as a kid um so this was kind of popular in like food circles in the 70s and 80s it's a soup that i love and it's an incredibly like simple soup there's not a lot of ingredients but it is technique driven right it's all about the technique so what we're gonna do today is get into the method of this the technique of french onion soup so you can make a beautiful soup with not a lot of ingredients just a little bit of technique for the most part with my french onion soup i stayed a classic kind of the classic technique and the classic ingredients i do have a few extras that i like to use just to kind of make it uh just a little bit better in my opinion so we're going to start off with onions the onions that i use are just plain yellow onions or white onions i don't go for the sweet vidalias or the maui sweets the onions have enough sugar in them already we don't need to add more sugar i find that when you use the sweet onions it tends to be a little over sweet and i don't want that whole butter i use whole butter unsalted you can use clarified if you want but i find whole butter is better because it has the milk solids in there and it starts to give us that like nice caramelized rich flavor that you need with this soup um the classic doesn't have thyme or bay leaf for the most part but i like thyme and bay leaf i like to use a little sherry as well this is an amato or medium dry sherry just to deglaze my pan i think that this gives a little more of that umami flavor or that backbone to the soup i have bread that i'm going to toast and that's just a regular loaf of italian bread and then last but not least the most important thing here is gruyere cheese you need to use real gruyere gruyere cheese has a little bit of funk to it it has this nice savoriness to it you can use swiss and i'm sure my parents used swiss when i was a kid but gruyere has a little bit of like background flavor it has this earthiness and nuttiness to it like i said this is a technique first part of this technique is the onions and how you cut them i process my onions this way i cut the top and the bottom off this can go into stock it can go into your compost bin it doesn't matter i take off the outer peel to make sure there's no dry onion on the inside so you can get rid of this stuff right so this is important really important for french onion soup you want the onions to stay fairly whole see so i got a little dry spot there that i'm going to take off i'm going to go down one more layer you want this to stay whole so if you cut across you can see there's lines here on the onions if you cut across those lines that's called a slice and if you slice your onions they're going to fall apart because we basically cut across all the fibers and the onions and they'll fall apart i don't want that for this soup for the onion soup that we're making today i want the onions to stay together no matter how long we cook them so what i do is a julienne i find those lines and i follow those lines and this is going to ensure that their onions stay together so make sure that you julienne your onions not slice them go along with the lines on the other onion my onions are sliced i've gathered the rest of my ingredients i have my butter my sherry i have salt i have some pepper and my herbs and we're going to get this going this is the the most important part of the technique i'm going to add my butter again like i said i'm using whole butter i have about a quarter of a pound of whole butter i'm going to let this melt i really don't want this to caramelize right now i just really want to melt it if you get a little bit of caramelization or browning that's okay it looks like a lot of butter we might take some of the fat off later but for the most part uh it's not it's uh flavor it's gonna be delicious okay so i'm gonna break my butter up and melt it okay once i get my butter in there i'm gonna turn my heat up turn it all the way up get it melted all the way and i'm gonna add all my onions some people will add garlic to this but i'm sticking to the fairly traditional way of doing this so all the onions go in okay if you see any onions with blemishes on it take it out uh all my onions go in my heat is all the way up i'm gonna hit it with a little bit of salt a nice pinch of salt and i'm gonna start to let this cook down and caramelize make sure it goes all over the place get some on the floor okay at this point you have to tend to this you can't just walk away you have to listen and watch and what i'm listening and watching for is that my onions are going to kind of start to shrink up they don't get burnt in any places because sometimes in the center of the ring they tend to get burnt i'm going to keep on moving them around and just watch it they're getting nice and caramelized this takes time this is the part of the technique that most people that make french onion soup don't have the patience for so it's going to take some time i'm here with a little black pepper now too always use fresh cracked black pepper okay and now we wait and stir the onions been on for about five minutes you can already see that they're starting to like shrink up and reduce uh some liquids coming out of them i'm just making sure that i stir and make sure that they're not getting too dark in one spot but i want to make sure that i can actually hear a little bit of sizzling going on and i can still hear a little sizzling which means that it's not just steaming i'm getting a little color when you hear sizzling and like crackling popping that's when you're still kind of sauteing or getting color if all you hear is or hissing that means all you're getting is steaming so you want to make sure that at this point you're getting color okay if you're getting a lot of color you have a gas burner you're getting a lot of color at this point you want to turn down your heat and just let it go a little slower this burner isn't super powerful so i'm not getting a lot of browning just yet but once it starts to get brown this is where you want to lower your heat my heat's all the way up now once my ends start to reduce they're probably going to start getting brown once as some of the sugars start coming out they're going to get brown so i'll lower my heat in a few minutes it's been about 15 minutes we're still not getting super brown yet but you can see my onions went from white to kind of a tan color i'm gonna keep moving them around not gonna let them get too dark in one spot because burnt is not brown we want it to be deep deep golden brown not burnt takes a little time we're at about 15 minutes since we started while the onions are caramelizing i want to talk about the pot that i chose i chose a pot that had kind of fairly high sides it's it's more of a stew pot than anything but it has a ton of surface area i don't want these onions in a stockpot where there's not a lot of surface area i want them more in a pot like this that has a little bit of room to put the broth in but also has a lot of surface area so they brown nice and evenly so try and find yourself a pot like this this is a cast iron but it's enameled on the inside so it doesn't like give off any of that kind of iron flavor but if you can find a pot with a heavy bottom that has a big amount of surface area on the bottom that's what you want to do the onions have been cooking for about 25 minutes and we're starting to get there right this is a critical moment um you can see that the bottom is starting to caramelize even more uh i haven't turned my heat down yet but like i said before if you have a hotter burner than me you should have turned your heat down by now uh and i'm really getting close they smell really nice and sweet and caramelized i'm gonna still give it a few more minutes before we add the stock it's been about 30 minutes and i think we're ready to go my onions are nice and caramelized i have a little bit of fond or some of the brown bits on the bottom of the pot and i'm going to add my sherry now and deglaze i'm going to add my sherry if you have a burner you want to be careful that the flames don't lick up and set this on fire uh but you want to just put your cherry in and get all those good bits off of the bottom scrape the bottom of your pan and basically all i'm gonna do with this sherry is try and cook out the alcohol you'll get a big whiff of alcohol to start now here's where the biggest misconception about french onion soup is i have chicken stock i'm using chicken stock uh it's chicken stock that i made i make a batch and freeze it but beef stock is kind of a shortcut that a lot of people tend to use the shortcut being that you don't caramelize the onions as much now it took almost a half hour for these onions to caramelize and get that nice roasty caramelized flavor so that's where the key is letting these onions caramelize really well so i'm going to add my chicken stock it's warm it's not hot but it's warm and i have about two quarts of chicken stock in there at this point i could have my time with that i tied up and my bay leaf [Music] and i'm going to put this on the burner in the back and let it simmer for about a half hour while the soup simmers i got a couple of things i got to prepare cheese i want to grate the cheese i got the gruyere you can get slices of this at your deli if that's great that works too but i'm going to grate it so just take it out of the package and i love gruyere gruyere has kind of a nuttiness to it a little bit of like i for lack of a better term funk and i love it it's a little stronger than swiss cheese it has a little bit of a waxy crust that you can get rid of that's just garbage and i'm just going to grate this on the large hole of my box grater how about 8 ounces here i'm probably not going to use it all on one bowl of soup but i'm going to grate it all anyway next thing i want to do is make the croots or the big croutons for the soup and all i do is i have a loaf of semolina bread here it could be pretty much whatever french bread you want and i don't go too thick i'm going kind of what is that about a quarter to a half an inch i don't want these to be really thick pieces of bread all i really want this to do is to go into my bowl and hold up the cheese so this cheese doesn't sink to the bottom so i'm just gonna make maybe four or five slices put these onto my little tray hit them with just a little bit of vegetable oil so they get nice and crunchy if you want to use butter or you want to use olive oil go for it and just a little bit of salt i'm going to put these in the oven until they're nice and golden brown and i want it to be fairly firm so that they soak up some of that soup soup has simmered for about 25 minutes i'm gonna give it one final taste i think it needs just a little more salt i'm gonna put another pinch in there and we're going to assemble okay i get everything i need by me i have soup crops now this is actually a soup crock from my childhood when my parents moved out of my childhood house i took their onion soup crocs so i think they bought these at a path mark on long island i don't really know but i have these i'm not going to use this one but i do have this one and i think i found this at a thrift store whenever i see onion soup crocks at a thrift store or goodwill i usually buy them just because they're good to have around for like any number of things and they usually like a buck so buy soup crocks right i also have my soup crack on a tray because what's going to happen is when i put this into the broiler some soup might spill so you never want to put this directly into the broiler like this you want to put it on a tray not only is it easy to get in and out on the tray if it spills it spills into the tray okay so what i'm going gonna do is get my soup crock filled get plenty of onions in there you wanna have a nice amount of onions you can see that my onions did not fall apart let me move the soup over and now we'll take our croot put it on top you see how it floats that's key you want it to float like that because this is going to hold all of our cheese up okay now classically what i've been taught is you'll take your gruyere and your cheese and put it on this and brown this and not brown the whole thing in the oven but we're gonna put lots of cheese on it so i take a lot of cheese you know i had eight ounces of cheese so i'm putting about a quarter of it on here i'm gonna go throw it in the broiler and then we're gonna taste okay it's out of the oven i'm gonna put onto a plate with a little napkin nice and carefully not to spill look at that isn't she gorgeous let's give it a taste before we taste i want to look at it right look at it it's beautiful it's got a nice cheesy crust on it it's not burnt but it does have some like caramelized stuff on the edge of the of the bowl and this is how i like it cheesy you can smell the gruyere the gruyere has a little bit of nuttiness to it and it's absolutely just like filled the house i love it so let's give it a taste so we're going to get in there and we get a little that stringiness which i like if you don't like that much cheese that's fine the soup tasted good by itself but that cheese just kind of brings out all that beautiful onion flavor nice delicious it takes a little bit of time it takes a little bit technique but in the end it's absolutely amazing you get a beautiful suit hope you liked this video if you did give us a thumbs up like subscribe hit the little bell to get notified when we have a new video out uh we have merchandise check the link down below thank you patrons for supporting us on patreon we have a patreon account there's also a link down below we also have an address if you want to contact us that way and that's it french onion soup i'm chef frank this is protocooks i hope you enjoyed have a good one [Music] you

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 226,847

Keywords: #soup, #frenchonionsoup, #onionsoup, #cheffrank, #chefdaddy, #protocooks, #needssalt, #classicalfrench, #soup101, #classics, #gruyere, #onion, #onions

Id: 9b6vs6fJJm4

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021