Should I call this “French” onion soup?
The best French onion soup—real French onion soup—the only true French onion soup is based on beef stock. And there’s really nothing better than taking the leftover bones from a standing rib roast and cooking them slowly for several hours to create inimitably rich and full-bodied beef stock. If you’ve got the time and inclination to do this on a Tuesday night, by all means, knock yourself out. But the rest of us need a different approach. (In case you’re interested, canned beef broth isn’t it.) Besides, onion soup is one of my Lovely Vegetarian Wife’s favorite dishes, one that she can rarely order in a restaurant since, unfortunately, most restaurant owners agree with me about real French onion soup.
The upside to a vegetarian onion soup is that it really allows the flavor of the onions to shine (although beef and onions might be the best pairing since… actually, I can’t think of any combination better than beef and onions. But this is a vegetarian soup.) When handled properly, a meatless onion soup can have an intensity of alliaceous goodness that surpasses that of the original.
The problem with a vegetarian onion soup, however, is not, “Where’s the beef?”, but, “Where’s the beefiness?” Any dish that focuses on vegetables is at risk of being dominated by bright, acidic flavors without any “meaty” structure to support them. The Japanese call this “meatiness” umami, which, come to think of it, might be the foodie buzzword of the 2000s. (Right after “foodie”, of course.) Food without umami is like music without bass: There’s no oompf, no foundation.
This recipe is a great example of how to get “meatiness” into meatless food. The first rule is that “more is more”:
A dozen onions, thinly sliced. After I finished cutting these onions, I noticed that my cat was behaving rather strangely, squinting and blinking rapidly. When I got closer to her, I realized that I had cut so many onions that I was actually making the cat cry. Did you even know that cats had tears? I didn’t. It was a little disturbing. Guiltily, I put her next to an open window to get some fresh air.
So, if you ask me how many onions you need for this recipe, the answer is, “Enough to make your cat cry.” More is more.
I put the first onion into the Dutch oven with a big glug of olive oil and a generous pinch of salt; I preheated the oven to 300 degrees and put the Dutch oven on medium-low heat. After every few onions, I added another pinch of salt and another tablespoon or so of olive oil. This is the second rule of creating “meaty” vegetarian food: Salting is like voting—do it early and often for best results. In this case, salting the onions causes them to exude their liquid which keeps them from burning. Once all the onions were added, I added some freshly ground black pepper and a bay leaf and stirred the onions around to make sure they were sufficiently coated with oil. Into the oven they went.
Confession time: Vegetarian onion soup isn’t exactly a weeknight meal either. I broke the preparation up over two days: On the first day, I roasted the onions for about three hours and then made vegetable stock in the same pot, which took another two hours. This was mostly hands-off work, and it enabled me to finish the dish in about twenty minutes on the next day.
Back to the recipe: Roast the onions for about an hour and a half, until they start to brown. Add 1/2 c of water and stir it around to deglaze the pan. Raise the oven temperature to 400 degrees and roast for another hour and a half, repeating the deglazing process every half hour. When the onions look like this…
… remove them to a bowl. This caramelization is rule #3 of umami-laden vegetarian cooking. Browning develops intensity of flavor: the bass notes, if you will, in a dish. Deglazing allows you to capture all of the caramelized sugars that are sticking to the pot and would otherwise go to waste. Therefore, in the same pot (Don’t wash it! Don’t rinse it out!), throw in the contents of your veggie stock bag and put it back into the oven. (Make sure to include some Parmesan rinds.) Roast for an hour; add water to cover, stir to deglaze and roast for another hour. Strain into a bowl. If you feel like eating at 1 am, push on with the recipe. Otherwise, refrigerate the caramelized onions and the vegetable stock separately. Go to bed.
When you’re awake and ready to eat, simply saute a clove of garlic and a bay leaf in a tablespoon of olive oil in a new pot, add the caramelized onions, cook for a few minutes and deglaze with 1/2 c of (dry, unoaked) white wine. Strain the vegetable stock into the onions and turn the heat to high. Bring the soup up to a simmer.
For the proper “French” onion soup effect (i.e., to make it a gratin), preheat the broiler. Make some toast; rub it with garlic if you like.
Pour some soup into broiler-safe bowls. Put the toast on top. Cover with as much grated Gruyere as you are willing.
Broil for 2-3 minutes until the cheese melts and starts to brown in spots.
Enjoy!
Having re-read this post, I feel like I made this soup sound way too complicated (and bad for your cats). Onion soup is really very simple: It consists of four parts (caramelized onions, stock, bread and cheese), two of which are prepared at the last minute with almost no effort. That leaves the onions and the stock, both of which can be prepared well in advance (even frozen for later use). If you want to substitute beef stock, chicken stock or even water for the vegetable stock, feel free.
Caramelizing the onions takes time, but very little work. In fact, the biggest challenge is slicing enough onions. If you have a mandoline or, even better, a food processor with a slicing disk, even that becomes a very manageable task.
In short, please give this recipe a try! If you plan ahead enough to make extra caramelized onions and extra stock and keep them in your freezer, you can have onion soup that’s better than anything you’ll get in a restaurant in 15 minutes!
[...] the fact that what you have on the stove could burn down your house, give you third-degree burns, drive your cat to tears, etc., carefully pour in 3 ladlefuls of batter (about 1/3 c each). I like to pour the first one [...]
No worries; I’m buying a big bag o’ onions tomorrow and making some soup. Cats deserve to cry sometimes, the heartless little bastards.
While I’m hoping that we don’t start getting comments from PETA regarding our treatment of cats, I hope the soup turns out well!
It was freakin’ awesome, both immediately and in leftovers. I even documented the process–it seemed fitting once I’d chopped so many onions even the houseplants were crying.
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[...] by making bechamel sauce: Grate the onion on the coarse holes of a box grater. (Try not to make your cat cry.) Add the butter and/or olive oil to a large saucepan and place over medium heat. When the [...]
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