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Today we're going to make French onion soup, also known as soup à l'oignon in France. It's the best poor man's dish in my opinion. And it's also the dish that you can find in any French brasserie. So these are all the different components I need for my beef broth. We have oxtail, some knuckles, marrow, bit of bones with a bit of meat on it. First things first, roasting the bones. Very high heat, you really want deep caramelization. The more color you get, the more flavor. We're roasting the bones at 450 for about 30 minutes. The roasting is really for flavor. It doesn't affect the texture. It's really to just bring those golden notes. You really want a deep brown that will just maximize flavor. Next,
cutting the aromatics. For this part, it's quite nice because it's extremely simple and it's a big rough chop. The broth is going to cook from anywhere to 6 to 12 hours, so you're really not looking for precision here. You want something that can hold for that long, but also just in more pieces so when you're roasting it, you have again more caramelization. Making stock at home is definitely a big process. It takes time, care. It's worth it because it just brings a taste that you can control. You can also make it your own and buying store-bought stock is just unknown. Now it's time to cut onions. That's the most important part of this soup. Depending on how you cut them, how thick you cut
them, it will definitely affect the end result. Here we're going to take our time, cut it with a mandoline to get paper-thin cut. We're just going to cut the face, cut the top, peel. Choosing a yellow onion compared to a white onion or any other onion, basically, it's it's a question of taste and it's a question also of historically that's how it's been made. And for example, if you use Vidalia onions, any onion that's more on the sweeter side, I think it's going to be too sweet. I definitely cry with onions. The trick is to have a sharp knife. The sharper your knife, the less you basically press on the fiber, and it is what makes you cry. Putting water in your mouth while you're cutting onions
kind of works. This is the way to cut the onion. You should cut from top to bottom instead of a half a minute. When you bite into a cooked onion that still has this fiber structure, it really throws me off. So, what I like about onion soup is that the right way to cut it is the other way, and you actually don't seal the fiber, especially when it cooks for an hour and a half. You can also do it with a knife. It's not mandatory to do it with a mandoline. What I love about mandolines, even though they are dangerous and you need to be careful, it just brings consistency, and consistency is what brings like restaurant level food to your home. All the rest will be for scraps or stock. Now, it's time to cook
the onions. This process is where a lot of people mess up the recipe and why it never tastes quite right. We're going to cook them for an hour and a half, which seems like a crazy amount of time for onions, but this is how but you're going to break down the fiber, and it's going to be soft and luscious. The goal is not to caramelize too fast. It has to go low and slow for a good hour until you pump it up a bit, and you're looking for a light golden color. You want to add the salt from the beginning to really season those onions. It will also help them sweat and break down faster. At the beginning, there's no risk of the onions coloring just because they're going to release moisture. As soon as the
moisture is out, though, you have to stir regularly to make sure that nothing is being stuck at the bottom, and you don't have a layer of two caramelized onions. So, it's starting to sweat a bit. Can start see them soften. These are going to cook for another an hour and 20 minutes. So, now it's time to go watch a movie, come back every 5 10 minutes, mix it for a sec, and make sure nothing is burning. It's been roughly 30 minutes. Uh the bones are roasted, the veg are as well. I added them for the last 15 minutes of the roast, and now it's time to make the stock. When you make stock, it's really important that the meat is deeply
caramelized. It really is the base of any great stock. Now it's time to put everything in the stock pot. So, you need a big pot. For a stock, it's it's really important to have space to have enough water that the ratio is right. So, now it's time to put all of the bones and the veg in that pot. I like to add a touch of fat, but definitely not everything. Just a touch because we roasted the marrow. We want to make sure all that flavor gets in there. For aromatics, I'm going to go very simple. Bay leaves, black peppercorn. Put a touch of salt. For me, flavoring things at every single stage creates a better balance in taste. For tomato paste, you want to use roughly, say, a big tablespoon or two.
Now it's time for red wine, like roughly like half a bottle for this amount. We're also adding water. The base to any great French sauce is with wine or at least alcohol. We're adding red wine and bringing this other layer of complexity. What you should do is a slow simmer. You don't really want the water to evaporate. You want to concentrate flavor by breaking down the collagen in the bones. This is the result of long, slow, steady cooking, which will give a very rich mouthfeel without adding butter or cream to anything. So, everything is covered right now. Now it's time to go low and slow for 6 to 12 hours. It's a big range. You can even go in restaurants, we go 24 hours. The onions have been cooking for an hour and
20 minutes. And for the last 10 minutes before I add the broth, I'm going to add some garlic. So, just take the center out to make sure it stays subtle. Garlic goes in. And now you really smell this caramelized onion kind of tarte tatin situation. As you can see, the onions are really completely broken down, and this is the result of an hour and a half of cooking. This is not something you can get after 20 minutes. It really deepens the flavor, brings the sweetness and complexity that you're looking for. You want to scrape all of the sides, cuz this is where the flavor comes. It's this Maillard reaction where it caramelizes, and this is where all
the flavor lands. It's time to add sherry. Sherry is a fortified wine from Spain, and I do think it brings it to another level. It's not conventional. I like sherry because of the sweetness and this prune-like taste. It's really to scrape all the bottom of the pan and get all of the nice caramelized bits. Yeah, use that with the steam to clean my pan completely. It also saves some time afterwards when you're cleaning all the dishes. Liquid has evaporated, and now it's time to add the stock. So, this is the finished stock. It has been cooking for roughly 12 hours, and I just passed it through a chinois. A chinois is a sieve. What's good with this? It's It's quite deep, so all of the big
chunks of bones can stay, and the broth will still go through. And you can just dump your garnish as it goes, and this is what you get. See a very clean, clear broth, a bit of fat, but very, very little. Now, the idea is to add the stock bit by bit and really come as one. If you're adding everything at once, you might have something that's too diluted, and then you reduce it, and then there's too much salt. It's just, you know, you put so much care and effort in both those elements. Just take your time and make it perfect until the end. See how it tastes. Very good. Stock is good in flavor. Just going to up the salt a bit. Not too much.
Final touch for this last step of the broth. Going to give it a time. Wrap it in twine. Why do I wrap it in twine? It's just for ease, so that when I have to take it out and have to start looking for every little piece of time. That's that. Now we want to slow simmer 30 minutes and we're done. While that is cooking, I'm going to roast some bone marrow to add in the sauce to make it even more luscious. The bones are going to go in the oven for 20 minutes. I like to add bone marrow in French onion soup just so that when you're eating it, you have a bit of texture element and you kind of fall onto a piece of bone marrow and this like fat explodes and brings just another layer of joy and greatness. Now it's
time to grate the cheese. In most recipes, you'll just find Gruyère, which is fine, you know, it's it's a great cheese. I like to bring Comté. I love this nuttiness that it brings and I think it will pair very well with the onions. So we'll do a 50/50. So when onion soup was introduced, it was just pure broth and onion. The cheese was introduced in Paris at Les Halles. I think it's just for pure decadence and what we call in French gourmandise. I don't know. I It's It's something that you do in cooking to round things up, bring this element of like joy and decadence that is just a pure French word that describes French food and this is just pure gourmandise. And then it was really popularized later on in Les Halles in Paris, which is
a famous neighborhood where there was the marché where people would bring all the meats, all the cheese, the vegetables and you would have the workers that would eat that before the day of work and you would have the more bourgeois and the richer people that would eat that at the end of their extravagant nights and they would meet at the same place and enjoy the same food even though they're from completely different worlds and that is where the cheese element came from is from Les Halles. Okay, so cheese is done. Now it's time to cut the baguettes. The idea is to put a few layers of baguettes toasted, preferably, at the top of the soup under the cheese so that it soaks up all the cheese and also soaks the top of the soup and becomes
really nice and full of flavor. Hey, the bread will go on the sweet tray, bit of oil, a touch of salt, and this needs to be roasted at 350 for 10 minutes. You just You're not really looking for a lot of color. You're mostly looking to dry out the bread. Okay, final step. Chives. We're nearly there. This is again, it's a bit over the top. You don't even need to do chives. I like it. So, when you're cutting chives, rolling it in a wet paper actually gives you stability and you can really press it and like make sure it's very tight. The chives, they bring color, they bring a bit of freshness. That's it. You don't need much. It's not a chive soup. Add a touch of cognac. It's the last finishing touch that brings a touch of luxury. So, a drop, really a drop. That's it.
Cognac is actually a protected region like champagne. You can only make cognac in cognac. I went there a few times and it's a really special place. Bit of pepper. And we're good to go. Now, it's time to take the thyme off. Bone marrow is sizzling. You just want to poke it and see there's any resistance. It looks pretty good to me. I love bone marrow. In France, we eat it on toasted bread, bit of butter. Should have it and make it fancy caramelized shallots. It's the best. Bone marrow is like butter. It's basically fats from the beef. It has a bit of a animal, you know, beefy flavor, obviously, but it's mostly fat. You know, you saw this recipe, I barely use
butter, so I have to compensate at some point. Yeah. The bread is there. We're not looking for any color. Just drying it out. We need piping hot soup. So, now it's assembly time. using the typical tête de lion bowl, which means lion's head because there are lions on the bowl. Don't ask why. Honestly, I don't even know why we use these bowls. It's quite of a deep bowl, which is perfect for the different layers of this soup. You want to go up to the lion's head, basically. Now I'm just going to add a bit of marrow inside the soup. Not too much. Beautiful. The bread goes in between the soup and the cheese. So the cheese melts in the bread, but it also soaks the soup. And now we have our mixture, cheese. Go for
it. Don't be shy. You want oozing, gooey. Just like that kind of stuff. Now it goes in the oven on broil for as long as it takes for it to completely melt. So you just stay in front of the oven, look at it, and make sure that it's not burning. Okay. Soup is looking good. Okay. With chives. Now it's time to taste. This is definitely a very cheesy situation. We want to get rid of everything. Get rid of the bread. The fact that the onions took so long to cook and the broth re-simmered for so many hours, it just completely transforms the onion soup that you know.
