How To Make Amazing French Onion Soup

today we're going to make french onion soup here's all those ingredients let's get into it right now so let's get into the ingredients we have 8 cups of low sodium beef stock I'm using beef base which is a simple way to get really good flavor in no amount of time if you have your own homemade beef stock NOW is 100% the time to use it this baguette is for the end when we're going to put the bread on top of it so you can just keep this off to the side let's talk about the onions quickly we did four lounds of these These are yellow onions I used but you can use other types of onions some onions will be a little sweeter than others this is a really sweet dish with the vermouth we're using and the white wine and the caramelization of the onions you don't need sugar in this you don't need anything like that I've had success making this really with any type of onion I would buy the larger onions you can they're easier to cut now if you're dealing with like this is 4 lounds of onions here if you have like 30 small onions it's going to be a big pain to do it we have 1 and 1/2 cups of Grier cheese this is the cheese that is traditionally used for it you can use mozzarella you can use provolone you could use Swiss you could use a lot of things 4 tbsp of butter that's going to sauté the onions we'll use a little bit of olive oil too I have a mix right here of vermouth and dry white wine the only reason why it's a mix and it's a cup there is because I just ran out of vermouth if you're going to use vermouth which is a fortified wine and is stronger than typically dry white wines I would go with 3/4 cup if you're going to just use dry white wine then I would use one cup we got garlic that's going to go in after we do our onions and the onions are going to take a while we have 1 tbspoon of flour that's going to thicken up our soup a little bit and then this we're going to put about one or two tablespoons of this tomato paste that's going to increase the body we're going to put salt pepper thyme lots of thyme in it and then this one is maybe a little special we're going to put one tablespoon of Brandy it's going to give it that nice finish that that flavor you know Brandy and vermouth are similar maybe that's a little redundant there but definitely if you were just using dry white wine I would definitely include that tablespoon of Brandy at the end can you make this without alcohol you can it's just not really a dish that is made without alcohol if you do want to do it though just follow the recipe completely and just omit the alcohol Jim for our vegetarian viewers what would you use in place of the beef stock I would go with vegetable stock I think a mushroom stock maybe something that just has a lot of body in it what makes this so potent this soup is the combination of the really good beef stock the wine and the onions if you're going to not have the beef for the chicken stock you're at a disadvantage so I would get the most flavorful vegetable stock possible onion time I have an 8q Dutch oven here you probably could get by with a 6q even better use like that 14in pan that I use in all my videos you'll be able to caramelize them quicker I'm going to heat this pot up to medium heat it's getting hot let's put in our onions put in a couple tablespoons of olive oil down there you might be thinking Jim I saw somebody do onions in the oven or I saw them do it in the insta pod or the slow cooker there's there's other ways to do this I'm showing you kind of the traditional way and kind of the foolproof way that you can't really screw up going to put in about one teaspoon maybe a touch more of salt put a little bit more olive oil take a couple ounces of water just put that in there too basically if you were using the 14-in pan it would do a little quicker now because when you're filling this up here you're you don't have as much of the heat on everything at the same time I'm just kind of getting all that olive oil to coat the onions and the salt salt salt will draw some more of the water out of them let's just cover this this will give it a head start if you don't if you just go straight without covering it it'll probably take like 90 to 100 minutes to do a full caramelization this might save us a little bit of time so let's do it about 10 minutes this has been like 12 minutes I'll show you how they look there's plenty of water so as long as it's that's the case you can keep going I do suggest you keep an eye on it because you don't want to start burning them one just really universal truth here you cannot do this in 15 minutes it's impossible but don't worry you got time you know you put on a little uh show or podcast you can watch our podcast it's the siping feast podcast different Channel all right so maybe spend 16 total minutes here like this so they reduced and they're nice and soft going to put butter in now that's 4 tablespoons of butter I like to start off with the oil first and the salt and the water just to get them a little bit going if you have an excess amount of water in this pan here you could spoon some of it out but but everything is going to evaporate now very quickly fairly soon you're going to have to frequently stir so you don't burn your onions it's always nice to use a flat Edge wooden spoon like this if you start to get any burning you can just knock it off there remember like I said you're going to have to play around with your heat levels they're just continuing to reduce originally we started up here the pot was filled by the time we finish they're not going to have too many in there but they're going to be really nice and caramelized we're just at the beginning stages of it okay we'll check back in about 10 or 15 15 minutes you might think oh if I just crank up the heat more I can do this quicker it doesn't work that way if you start burning a lot in the bottom and you start getting a lot of black chunks in here and it's going to ruin your flavor you're looking for the sweetness really Ultra sweetness to come out of these onions I find that these things are more than sweet enough if you do it properly they're too sweet if you add sugar so you can see the color now looks a lot more you know a lot of people would stop right here I don't want to I want to get them more or caramelized you know compared to what we started with we have barely anything in the pan now feel like you're burning it all you just put a touch of water in here okay just like that and then then you can just remove any of the brown bits at the bottom of your pot the water will evaporate in seconds but what it'll do is it'll just lower the temperature of the pot just a little bit that you can keep going without ruining anything you know if it's really burning quickly just grab the pot remove it put it on a hot plate whatever get it off as I go I just continue to go like this see how everything is clean on the bottom of my pot because I've been doing this the whole entire time this is what they look like so after 45 minutes this is perfect right here like this you can go probably another 5 10 minutes to get them even deeper if you want I only went another 2 minutes I am really happy with the color of that I'm putting all the garlic in right now and we're going to stir this in here let it cook until it gets nice and fragrant it's only going to take a couple minutes I'm going to put in 2 tbspoon of tomato paste so one two mix this paste in here this is going to really boost the flavor of our french onion soup let's let this cook four more minutes if you start to burn it all tiny bit more water that's all you got to do so here's 1 tablespoon of flour this is regular allpurpose flour put it in here and just mix it around maybe 2 minutes we're just going to take all the white color out of it and this flour is going to help thicken our soup just a bit that's good what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add in my wine half for half white wine or 13 removed 2/3 wine as I said in the beginning if you're using Straight remou I recommend a half a cup if you're using straight white wine a dry white wine I recommend a cup that's all you have to do you don't have to reduce this liquid at all don't do that now I'm putting the beef stock in and with my horrible pore spout all right so mix this through you can take your whisk again whisk it in going to turn this to high so we're going to let this come to a boil I have thyme I want the recipe has 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme leaves if you don't have fresh thyme you can 100% use dry thyme dry time is really good it's one of those herbs that works well when it's dried unlike basil that's horrible you can take some of that time like this much and you can just kind of break it up I'm going to put a bunch of my thyme in here the fresh ones too but I'm going to save some of it for uh my garnish at the end let's bring this up to a simmer and as it's starting to come up to a boil slowly there's a lot of in lot in there I'm just going to take that flat edge of the spoon just try to feel around if there's any bits stuck to the bottom just dislodge them with your spoon those are your flavored bits but everything is good we were keeping our bottom of our pot very smooth the whole time okay once it comes up to a simmer just back off your heat um to about maybe a four out of 10 maybe a three just a very low simmer now so now it's delicious what I can do right away is I can put some pepper in here french onion soup always needs a lot of black pepper we don't want to do anything with the salt we can taste a little bit and then adjust so that's why we didn't add anything until we give it a taste now Tara criticism always is that most french onion soup you get is always super salty and I agree with that I hate to disappointer but I am going to add a little bit more salt you can let this simmer for about 10 minutes 15 minutes ideally if you have the time turn it off let it cool put it in the fridge overnight it will be a million times better the next day like all soups and stews let it simmer we'll cut our bread up and uh get our cheese ready and our Broiler on set your Broiler where it can accommodate baking tray and your Crocs whatever size Croc you're going to use you know I have all different types here that are different thicknesses like this one's a big one it's like a 20 oz one and these are a lot smaller so again if you want you can use the Brandy here I just tasted it it tastes pretty strong with that vermo so I'm just going to omit it if you were using dry white wine you probably would want to put that one tablespoon of Brandy you can taste it if you think you need one and a half tablespoons do it you got a couple choices here you can toast your bread up on like a baking sheet you with the cheese and then you can just top it on right at the end which is really simple way to do it or you could do it the more traditional way which would be you put the bread here cheese Broiler you could even do a very non-traditional way would be to cut up little cubes or croutons just put a few some people don't like so much bread in it this is a bagette so very you know very small pieces I think you could definitely get away with two pieces in each of these amount of cheese you put here I have 1 and 1/2 cups for this recipe so what we made here is going to make like four big bowls but if you're doing small ones like this you'll get like eight okay it's nice to put cheese on one side leave the other part of the bread exposed so you get like a little contrast there all you have to do here is put these in for about 2 to 4 minutes just keep an eye on it the whole time it can start burning very quickly though you do want to get some color on top of the bread all right we'll be back in uh few minutes we let this cool down long enough it would be hard for it to come out you know like when they give it to you in a restaurant and you just can't it's too hot so it's probably still hot it's been like 15 minutes go go ahead enjoy I know you tweaked it a little bit yep I tweaked it this is better than it was last week and last week was really good it was too strong last week right it had a strong Brandy yep flavor this is I I didn't even put Brandy in it this is half vermouth half white wine the flavor of the I guess it's the vermouth that I'm tasting is subtle but it's not overpowering yeah this is perfect thank you this is so good yeah if you have homemade beef stock and you use it here that's the time to use your beef stock for something like this or chicken stock if you want something a little lighter you know the beef and the onions everything can tend to overwhelm so chicken stock a good chicken stock wouldn't be a bad idea and and maybe even like you were saying in the beginning a vegetable stock yeah like a mushroom yeah I said earlier my biggest issue with french onion soup when you get it in a restaurant is that it usually has way too much salt I don't like a lot of salt in my food I like just kind of enough to to flavor it so this is perfect for me it actually reminds me of it was probably the first time I ever had french onion soup when I was a little girl every time I have french onion soup it takes me back to that time but yeah I mean like this is something like you'd get at Diner or pool of hand whatever but this is way better because it's homemade and it's not overs salted and I don't know are those places that like those chain restaurants they're probably not even they no they don't make they don't make anything those it's probably from a box so this is outstanding I would love some chicken thighs yeah with the French onion the fren like with the flavors of the French onion like with the caramelized onion and then maybe the melted grer cheese would be a really good dish too well maybe we'll address that at some point but uh for now just regular old boring french onion soup what would you give it it's hard because I can't think of what else I would do to adjust it so that's usually how I I get it measure all right fine give it a 10 you know what I'll take a 10 honestly maybe a little more fresh time because I love the flavor of time so much so maybe that so I'm going to give you a nine okay well thank you all right we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Sip and Feast

Views: 178,659

Keywords: French onion soup recipe, easy french onion soup, sip and feast

Id: y6Zdcm9-6v8

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2023