French Friday with Dorie: Cheese-Topped (French) Onion Soup

PATIENTLY COOKED ONION SOUP--DELICIOUS!

We love soup at our house, in fact, soup is daughter #2's favorite food.  She  makes tasty broths, loves lots of added vegetables, and eats it by the pot.  But for some reason, French Onion Soup has not made it into our regular rotation, even though it is a healthy, comforting food.

When I was young my mom  found ways to use the hundreds of pounds of onions that my Dad would harvest from our garden.  I especially remember one year having onion and cheese casseroles (something like mac and cheese), liver ‘n onions once a week (my Mom made us eat this dish for good health), onions in salads, pickled onions, onions sauteed with tomatoes (and a little sugar), and onion soup.  But I don’t remember her onion soup being as good as today’s French onion soup.  It did not have the scrumptious toasted bread topped with the melted cheese that turned this simple dish into gourmet food.

NO CARAMEL COLOR AT 1 HOUR

I read through Dorie’s recipe and was very careful to caramelize the onions very slowly and carefully over low heat.  I did not want any burned piece of onion that would make my soup taste bitter.  But I must have had too low a heat because after an hour my four pounds of sliced Spanish onions looked almost as fresh as when I first added them to my Dutch oven.  Dorie cautioned that it might take an hour or more to achieve a deep caramel color and we should not try to speed up this process by using a higher heat.

NO CARAMEL COLOR AT ALMOST 4 HOURS

I was working on office papers and would be up for awhile, but I wanted the soup to be finished so I did adjust the heat upwards thinking that my low was just too low...on my scale from 1 to 10, the knob had been at a 3.  I turned it to 4.

At midnight there was just a hint of color, poor Hubby woke up from smelling too many onions, so I needed to be done.   After letting it cool, I put the whole pan into the fridge and decided to work on it the next day.

FINALLY FINISHED AT ALMOST 6 HOURS

The next afternoon I was watching my grandkiddies who wanted to play outside so I took advantage of that time to put my onions back on the heat, this time at a 5...a mid range, definitely not on low.  While we played, the onions simmered for another hour...this is now 5 hours of cooking and finally they began to get some good color.  And I deserved good color after all this time, so I let them cook and I stirred every 10 minutes for another 40 minutes.  Almost 6 hours to caramelize my onions, but it was worth it.  They were sweet, really sweet, and dark and rich tasting.  The added chicken broth took on the caramel color as the soup sat for an hour or two before dinner, but I was thinking that a beef broth would have created an even darker, richer color.

I'VE JUST ADDED THE BROTH, BUT AFTER SITTING FOR 2 HOURS IT BECAME DARKER AS IT TOOK ON SOME OF THE CARAMEL COLOR

It would be a couple of hours before dinner so the kiddies and I had an outing to purchase a French baguette which complemented our French soup.  We also bought Gruyere cheese which is a mild and fabulous melting Swiss cheese that the French people love to use in many of their dishes....kinda like AZ folks using CA cheese...they are good neighbors.  After returning home, we heated our soup to boiling, grated the cheese,  and we filled our broiler safe bowls with the hot soup.  Then we topped the soup with a slice of toasted bread and crowned our creation with the grated cheese. 
 

HOT AND WITH CHEESE MELTING DOWN THE TOAST AND INTO THE SOUP--DELICIOUS!

After a few minutes under the broiler our cheese-topped onion soup was ready to eat.  YUM!  The stringy, melted cheese (melted down over the bread and into the soup) on the toasty bread that had sopped up lots of very flavorful soup was delicious.  9 year old Penguin quickly finished her bowl and declared it good!  Her dad arrived and ate two bowls....also said it was good, in fact, really good. I agreed.  Other family came and went and by the time I was ready to clean up, the entire pot of soup had been eaten.

It was so good that I did not mind my house smelling like onions for 2 days.  When I make this soup another time, I’ll cook it very slowly again; won’t change a thing, except that I’ll begin caramelizing my onions after breakfast rather than after dinner, and I might cook them outside.