Chef Ben Says: Warm Your Soul with Soup
Do I really need to go into the correlation between cold weather and hot soup? Nope. You all know the power of this combination. Pretty sure my job here is to apply well timed technique to help satisfy your soupy cravings. So without further ado...
We're going to make French onion soup. The traditional kind. Not the kind where we bust out the boullion cube, or reconsitite a packet of crunchies, but the real deal.
It's going to require:
2 cups chicken stock, homemade (see "Stock is King")
2 cups beef stock, homemade ^^^^^
6 spanish onions, julienne
6 red onions, julienne
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup butter
black pepper, thhyme and worcestershire until it tastes good
1 cup white wine
1 loaf french bread
1/2 lb gruyere cheese (for the hardcores, or a milder swiss like jarlsberg is nice too)
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup butter
It goes like this:
The biggest pain in the keyster of the whole recipe is peeling and slicing all of those onions. It seems like an enormous amount, but they're going to cook down to approximately 25% of their original size. I like to peel them, cut them in half and use my little ceramic mandolin thingy. That way I can get perfect uniformity and slice directly into my wok, with lots of butter, which is how I like to cook giant piles of onions.
Then over low heat, we cook...
Stirring frequently, and we cook some more...
These are almost done, which took about 35 minutes and a fair amount of stirring. We boiled off all of the juice, and what's left is sizzly sweet carmelized goodness that's ready for some love. Go ahead and add the thyme, pepper and worcestershire. Stir a couple of times. Add the wine and cook almost all the way down. When it's starting to stick, add the onion mixture to the stock, and simmer 15 minutes or so, while you're making your croutons.
Meanwhile, add the olive oil to the butter and nuke for 30 seconds, until the butter is melted. Dip little rounds of french bread about 1/2" thick and put them on a cookie sheet.
Bake in a 425 degree oven until brown and crunchy, 7-10 minutes.
Preheat your broiler to low, ladle the soup into some oven safe crocks, top with croutons and swiss cheese slices, and broil for 3-5 minutes until bubbly and just starting to brown. BE CAREFUL EVERYTHING'S OMG SO HOT!!!
Whoa...
More soups to come...
Cheers,
Chef Ben