Beef or Chicken Stock for French Onion Soup
Leave it to the French to make a glorious, silky soup from a vegetable as ordinary as an onion. But if it's so easy to make, why are we often subjected to shoddy bowls of thin, tasteless onion-water? Or, worse, acrid burnt onion broth? Or even worse: a cloudy, oily mess? Like many straightforward dishes, the outcome relies on nailing the technique and deploying just the right ingredients. So the Epicurious Test Kitchen merged the best parts of the recipes on our site to create Our Favorite French Onion Soup.
Here's how we cracked the code on this time-honored recipe:
Pair beef broth with white wine (and skip the flour)
Let's start with the foundation for our soup. We've seen recipes that use beef broth, chicken broth, or a mix of the two. We've also seen recipes that call for red wine, white wine, or no wine at all. Our taste tests revealed the combination of an all-beef broth with white wine as the clear winner, as used in this Gourmet French Onion Soup. The beef broth (obviously home-made is best, but store-bought works too) adds an underlying richness to the soup, and we favored the lightness and acidity that white wine brings to the table.
We also tested thickening the soup with flour as well as omitting it from the recipe. We preferred the no-flour version, as used in this Bon Appétit rendition, which provides a beautiful clear broth without muddying the sweet and savory flavors of the soup.
Caramelize your Vidalia Onions Slowly
As we read through your comments on the French Onion Soup recipes on the site, we heard you loud and clear: "More onions!" After all, it's not called "Broth Soup" or "Cheesy Bread Soup." So we took a cue from another Bon Appétit recipe and upped our onion-to-broth ratio to let the main ingredient shine.
We also found many recipes that just called for "onions." But what kind of onions make for the best soup? We tried caramelizing red, yellow, and Vidalia onions and—shocker—the sweet Vidalias came out on top. Just a sprinkle of sugar and salt (and heat) transform these sweet onions into sweet, nutty, silky strands of pure gold.
But perfectly caramelized onions take time. Undercook your onions, and you'll miss out on all that the savory sweetness. Some recipes call for cooking them for as little as 15 minutes, but we felt that this was not enough time to draw out their full flavor potential. Cook them too quickly over heat that's too high, and you risk burning them and adding a scorched, bitter taste to your soup, so resist the urge to speed up this step. This French Onion Soup with Comté calls for cooking the onions for about an hour, which we thought was just right. When your onions are an even, deep golden brown like the kind of tan everyone wanted in the 80s, you know they're ready.
Don't Clobber Your Soup with Herbs
We initially tried adding a bundle of rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves to our soup, but found the rosemary to be a bit overpowering. The combination of thyme and bay leaves found in this recipe for Onion Soup with Loads of Thyme and Giant Gruyère Crostini was really well balanced, lending a subtle herbaceous flavor and aroma.
Go for Gruyère
We're not naming any names, but we know some people who eat French Onion Soup mostly for the blistered, melty, cheesy cap on top. So of course we had to give this element as much attention as the rest of the soup. And, just like the onions, many recipes call for generic "Swiss cheese." Again, we asked, "What kind of Swiss cheese?" We narrowed it down to two contenders: Emmentaler and Gruyère. We tried them separately and mixed together. The slightly sweet, salty, nuttiness of Gruyère as found in this recipe won us over and was chosen to adorn our soup.
Finish with a splash of sherry
Many recipes include brandy in the cooking process or to finish the soup. We tried adding a touch to our brew, but it was a little too sweet. So we took a tip from Mixed Onion Soup in Sourdough Bread Bowls and tried finishing our bowls with a splash of dry sherry. The sherry complements the nuttiness of the Gruyère beautifully and adds a bright finish to the soup, yet the raw alcohol flavor gets mellowed by the warm broth. All in all, it's the perfect finishing touch.
Source: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/how-to-make-best-french-onion-soup-recipe-article
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