Soup's On: Onion Soup

By Anthony Todd in Food on Feb 11, 2009 5:00PM

Onion soup is one of the recipes that every cook should know. It’s cheap, easy to make, hard to screw up and will make all of your guests very, very happy on a damp night. We’ve seen an infinite variety of onion soups all over the interwebs, including everything from the simplest (sauté onions for 5 minutes, dump in beef bouillon cubes) to the most complex (roasting ingredients overnight in a slow oven). We like to think our recipe is somewhere in the middle.

There are a lot of onions in this soup. They may even be too much for your soup pot. Don’t worry - they cook way down. We went from a pile of onions a foot deep to a pot of cooked onions 3 inches deep in 45 minutes. Also, we mix red onions, white onions and shallots - but you can use whatever members of the onion family you have around.

A note on “Onion Soup” vs. “French Onion Soup.” French onion soup comes with that oh-so-tasty glop of cheese and bread on the top, and is usually baked in the oven before serving. We don’t cook this version for 3 reasons: It takes longer, it requires special bowls (which we don’t have) and we always manage to badly burn ourselves making it. Instead, if you want the same effect with this soup, grate some Gruyere or other Swiss cheese onto thick slices of French bread, put them under the broiler for a few minutes and then float them on top of your bowls of soup.

Anthony’s Onion Soup

3 large yellow onions, sliced thinly
3 large white onions, sliced thinly
2 shallots, sliced thinly
4 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
½ stick of butter
2 tbsp flour
4 cups of beef broth
2 cups of chicken stock
3 tbsp port or brandy
1 tbsp thyme

Melt the butter in a LARGE soup pot. Dump in all the chopped onions and the garlic. Cook, covered, over medium-high heat, stirring every few minutes. Try to make sure all of the onions make it to the bottom of the pot. If it starts to burn, add more butter and lower the heat. After about 30-40 minutes, the onions should be cooked down into a thick mess, with a lot of their own juices. At this point, uncover, turn up the heat to high and get them to a nice light brown color, stirring often.

Once the onions are cooked, add the flour. Cook for 2 minutes and then add the thyme and alcohol for another minute. Add the broths and bring to a boil. Once the soup has boiled, reduce to a simmer and cook for as long as you like. After 30 minutes, the soup will be good. After 2 hours, the soup will be ambrosial. Serve with lots of bread.