Tyler's Ultimate French Onion Soup a la Terri

A couple of weeks ago, I made one of my absolute favorite all-day recipes. I must have been having some pregnancy cravings for onions, because I found myself making a trip to the grocery store to buy sour cream, Lay's potato chips, and dried onion soup mix, plus the ingredients to make this real soup (not from a package...).  I didn't realize the pattern till I got home. Onions? Why not!

The reason it's an all-day recipe is because it takes a while to prep that many onions, and then to caramelize them properly, it takes hours of low and slow heat. If you turn the heat up too high, you'll grill or char them which is not what you want. You want them to become beautifully dark brown and that takes sweet, sweet time. But it's worth every hour!

This recipe is inspired by Tyler Florence from his show Tyler's Ultimate. It is painfully simple - one of the shortest recipes I use (and a quick one to memorize so I don't actually use it any more), the only thing that makes it not a staple is the time required. It is also one of the few recipes that I don't really modify (you'll see the few modifications that I do make, and they're pretty typical for me). Most recipes I make my own in one way or another, but this is one of the few that stays almost entirely intact right up until the very end.

Giving all due credit, here's the original recipe. I'll break it down now with my (slight) edits.

Tyler's list below, my edits are in italics
Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter
4 onions, sliced I typically use more onions than this... many MANY more because I make this a huge batch at a time, and also because I like a heartier/chunkier soup with more onion pieces. Personal preference!
2 garlic cloves, chopped I also (obviously) add more garlic because it's me. 
2 bay leaves
2 fresh thyme sprigs
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup red wine, about 1/2 bottle
3 heaping tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 quarts beef broth
1 baguette, sliced
1/2 pound grated Gruyere I do my croutons/cheese differently... we'll get to that at the end. 

Below are the instructions. Go to the website above to see a condensed version of the original recipe to print / cook from. Similar to above, I'll add my commentary in bold italics along with my pictures. This particular batch had more modifications than usual because I got creative in the onion department. I had a bunch of white onions on hand, a couple of red onions, yellow onions were on sale at the store, I had just harvested the scallions from my garden that had been growing all summer, I had some scallions in the fridge, and the leeks looked irresistibly beautiful at the store that morning, so I added those in too. Tons of different things from the onion family that all added to the complexity of this particular batch of soup. Loved it, but it's still super delicious with just a few regular white or yellow onions.

One note: you do not need to splurge for vidalia, Spanish, or sweet onions to make a sweeter soup. The reason is that when you caramelize onions as much as you need to for this recipe, I don't care what kind you start with, they will all become incredibly sweet by the time you're done, (plus I even add sugar to help the caramelization process), so you don't need to spend the extra $$ to start with sweet onions.

Added first step: prep all the onions. The recipe here says "sliced" but I don't slice them. After all, this is FRENCH onion soup, so you should French your onions - and yes, that is a thing. See below for pictures of how to French your onions rather than slicing them. If you don't want to learn this it's no problem, you can obviously still slice them. But to be honest this is actually less work, and it makes for a better texture in the soup IMO. If you're skipping this step, skip past the flip-book of onion slicing pictures below and get to the step where they're all prepped on my cutting board.

Here is my menagerie of onions

To prep my onions, I start off by cutting off the top and bottom, then slicing it in half from top to bottom (creating an east and west hemisphere), removing the paper, and then get ready to FRENCH!

Here's a photo series of me Frenching onions - basically cut from the edge in towards the bottom-middle. With each slice, you're cutting to the same point in the bottom-middle of the onion half. 

Then when you've gotten through half of the half, lay it down again, and start over from the other side (unless you're ambidextrous, in which case switch hands with the knife. But I'm not and I'm quite partial to all my fingers, so I flipped the onion).

Here are all my onions cleaned and ready to be Frenched!

I love the mild onion flavor that leeks provide. When using leeks, you only use the white and light green parts, so when I saw this beauty in the store I had to get it! The white part was the majority of the leek, so I knew I'd be able to use most of it which doesn't always happen!

Leeks are grown in sandy soil, and that sandy soil can often get in between the layers. So when you're preparing leeks, first cut off the hairy end. Then peel off the outside layer to clean it. Then cut it in half down the middle. Lay each half flat-side down on the cutting board, and cut your leeks into half-moons. 

Rinse the half-moons thoroughly under water rubbing them with your fingers to make sure you get all the silt out from between all the layers. 

On the left are store-bought scallions, on the right are ones from my garden. The ones on the right at one point started like the ones on the left, but after a summer of real soil, they are much hardier and healthier. When I use green onions (aka scallions), I only use the green and top of the white part, and I save an inch or two on the hairy end. I soak the roots in a cup of water until they re-sprout out top. Once I get some growth, I put the roots in my garden and they regrow into the beauties on the right. Then when I want scallions, I just go to the garden and cut what I need without clear-harvesting and pulling up the bulb, so that way I have scallions all summer long! This was getting to the end of the season though, so I clear-harvested my scallions, and that's what they looked like. I just sliced these on a bias.

Melt the stick of butter in a large pot over medium heat. I also add a few turns of olive oil. Add the onions, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, sugar and salt and pepper and cook until the onions are very soft and caramelized, about 25 minutes. Lies. This takes hours. 

This was the pot I was going to use... this is about 2/3 of the onions I prepped. I knew they would cook down a TON, but I didn't have room for them all initially!!

I still had this many onions left, plus the leek and scallions... gonna need a bigger pot!

Here's why you don't add salt yet (sorry Tyler!) and in fact, you add ~1 tsp of sugar instead. You add salt when you want to "sweat" vegetables. Adding salt pulls the moisture out of vegetables, and they basically boil / steam in their own juices. Doing this prevents vegetables from browning. And if you learn anything from this post, it's that BROWN FOOD TASTES GOOD!!!! (Thanks Anne Burrell for that gem.)  However, what turns brown when cooked? Sugar! What happens when you cook sugar till it's brown? You get caramel. What are we trying to do to the onions? CARAMELIZE them!! DING DING DING!!!! That's why some of the veggies that caramelize the best have high sugar content - think onions, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots, even zucchini. And adding a small amount of sugar will really help this process along. So just ~1 tsp is all you need, and make sure you don't add salt until the caramelization process is over; but beware, you'll definitely need to season to taste to make sure that you add enough salt to balance out the added sugar. 

 

 That completely full pot + the remaining onions on my cutting board cooked down to this after about 15-20 mins.

Finally enough room to add the leeks!

Note to self: Tying my thyme in a bundle like this didn't work so well for me... the thyme disintegrated into the soup (as it should), leaving me with loose stems and a string to fish out. Next time, I'll add it in an herb sachet that I can pull out all at once, or I'll just toss in the sprigs like I usually do and pull out the stems once it's done cooking and the leaves have fallen off. 

I finally upgraded to a bigger pot with enough room for all the ingredients. This is after ~45 minutes of caramelizing low and slow. Mmmmmmm...

This is after well over an hour. To be honest, I could have let it go for at least another 45 minutes, but I was getting impatient. The darker, the better at this step - this was probably 3/4 of the way to perfection. This is the step when you're building the key flavors of your soup.

Add the wine, 

A common misconception is that you buy cheap cooking wine. False. Never cook with wine that you're not willing to drink because as you cook with it, the flavors concentrate. So if you start with shitty wine, your food will taste strongly of shitty wine when you're done. Unfortunately, we drink cheap wine in our house, so it is what it is. Such is life. We have two types of wine at home: the really nice stuff that we've received as gifts or bought for ourselves from Napa which is signed by the wine maker, and this crap that we drink (or drank in my case) on weeknights. Yes you should cook with "good" wine, but our good wine is really good wine, I plan to drink that stuff (once the baby comes), not cook with it. So we cook with our cheap shit, but it still follows the rule bc we drink it too. See guys, I keep it real with you... no trying to be fancy here, you see things as they really are!! Also, if you don't have a double-hinged wine opener, then 1) you were never a server in your life, and 2) you're not really living. They cost like $6. Get one now.

Bring to a boil,

reduce the heat and simmer until the wine has evaporated and the onions are dry, about 5 minutes. Lies again, this takes more like 15-20 mins

You can see the bottom of my pot shimmering in the camera's flash in the upper-left corner of this picture. Again I probably could have gone a few more minutes at this step, but I wanted soup.

Discard the bay leaves and thyme sprigs. Dust the onions with the flour and give them a stir. Turn the heat down (turn down for what? For soup!!) to medium low so the flour doesn't burn, and cook for 10 minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.

Here's my onions/wine with added flour.

Now add the beef broth, bring the soup back to a simmer, and cook for 10 minutes. Season, to taste, with salt and pepper. (Not pictured, because there's nothing noteworthy about this step). The season to taste part is important because of the added sugar, you need to make sure the end product isn't too sweet. They key is that as you're adding the broth, you need to really whisk the heck out of the pastey onion-flour mixture to avoid getting flour clumps in your soup.

When you're ready to eat, preheat the broiler. Arrange the baguette slices on a baking sheet in a single layer. Sprinkle the slices with the Gruyere and broil until bubbly and golden brown, 3 to 5 minutes.
Ladle the soup in bowls and float several of the Gruyere croutons on top.

That's Tyler's method to finish off the soup. Up to this point, he is spot on with every step of the soup, layering in complex flavors at every turn, and it would be delicious as described. BUT I've spent 4 years of my life in Wisconsin. A polite sprinkling of Gruyere is not going to cut it for me. At this step in the soup building process, I flash back to the French onion soup I grew up eating that my parents made. I use their method of layering homemade croutons and a variety of cheese that is gooey and delicious. 

We begin with said homemade croutons. I like a lot of bread in my French onion soup, so one little baguette slice is not going to cut it. I have homemade croutons in my freezer frequently, because it's my favorite thing to do with bread that is going / about to go stale. You can see my bag of stale bread slices that I popped in the freezer when they were a few days old and turning. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. I cube the bread, put it in a single layer on the sheet pan, drizzle with olive oil, and toss the bread to somewhat evenly coat with the olive oil. It'll never be coated perfectly, but do what you can. I then sprinkle evenly with garlic powder, onion powder, and Lawry's seasoned salt (which are the dry ingredients in homemade Chex mix. Coincidence? I think not! This is my Dad's recipe for croutons, and Chex mix is our favorite thing ever, so we use that seasoning combination a lot). 

Bake in your 300 degree oven and toss the croutons every 5-10 minutes. Keep an eye on them since cooking time will vary depending on how dry your bread is and how hot your oven is, but pull them out when they start to turn golden and are dry and crunchy. 

Now that the croutons are done, let's talk cheese. As a base, start with a swiss-like cheese. It can be Swiss, Gruyere, Emental, or whatever else in that family. If you want to be straight forward, you can't go wrong with Swiss. If you want to get fancy, talk to your local cheese monger (if you don't have a cheese monger, again, you aren't really living). But you want that sharp flavor with a slight funk. Then you'll want something salty with a little bit of a bite and an ooey gooey texture- my favorite is muenster, but you can also do monterey jack, brick, varieties of Edam, etc. And to top it, you want a super sharp, salty cheese that will still melt, so Parmesan or Asiago would be good, but likely not romano because it doesn't really melt. To make life easier, I get the base layer in slices, I shred the middle layer, and grate the top layer. I went cheapo this time with the cheeses, but you can make it as fancy as you want.

And now, we assemble. First, pre-heat your broiler. I don't have oven-safe soup crocks (uni-taskers, so nope), and my ramekins are too little, so I use the bottom of Pyrex storage containers bc they're oven-safe!  Again, no pretenses here guys, you get to see me working in my natural environment! Ladle the soup into your oven-safe container, then float as many croutons as you want on top. As I said, I like a lot of bread in my soup so I really pack em in there. And can we just take a moment to admire how GORGEOUS that soup base looks before it gets all dressed up?? I'm telling you, BROWN FOOD TASTES GOOD!!!!

Then start layering your cheeses. As noted (and given the selections I went with), I did the slice of Swiss first, then the shredded Muenster, and finally topped it with the grated parmesan. Put your dishes on a baking sheet since it's likely to bubble over if you did it right. Pop it under your broiler on the top rack for however long it takes for the cheese to get melty and gooey and brown and bubbly and amazing, usually 5-15 mins.

I'm drooling.

And the best part about this recipe is that the leftovers taste just as good. Extra soup base can be refrigerated or frozen. I'll grate/shred all my cheese at once and save it in the fridge. Then when I want more soup, I'll ladle some into my dish, microwave it till hot, then assemble with croutons and cheese, broil for 10 mins, and I have fresh French onion soup any time I want with minimal additional effort. That's why I make a HUGE batch of the base, because that's the part that takes so much time, though it takes no more time to make a big batch vs. a little one, and then I can have fresh soup for a week or two... or however long it lasts in my fridge! 

Seriously?!?! I'm sad I just ran out of left overs.