Classic French Onion (Onyo) Soup! | Chef Jean-Pierre

Okay you guys wanted a recipe for an onion soup. Check this guy. Now that's an onion. I mean holy my. We have some friends in India that are sending us messages and say we only get little onion. They get they get onion like this one over there in India. Look at this. This is an American onion. God bless America. Check this onion. Holy macaroni. That has to be one of the biggest onion I've ever seen. And believe it or not I got a Costco. I saw a bag of 10 pound onion. It was about three of them in the bag. Anyway this is an onion folks and a super fresh onion. We're gonna make you a beautiful onion soup today. I'm gonna show you how easy it is to make a delicious onion soup. You're gonna love it. I'm gonna show you how to cut the onion and I don't just put onion in my onion soup. I put three kind of onion. I put leeks. Check this out. Man I got all my vegetables on steroid. Look at this thing. Holy macaroni. That's a leek. I already cut them. You see look I did it in advance otherwise that video would be three hours. So what I did is I cut them and you know I get rid of the really dark green leaves of the leek because they're very bitter. And so I cut them and I wash them and I freeze them. And when I make a beef stock I use them right. But you only want to use it when you buy leek you want to buy a white leek. Whiter it is sweeter it is. You want to buy a straight leek. I don't know if you're gonna find a leek like this. This is an organic leek that I get at my grocery store. It's gorgeous. So you remove the root. You cut it in half. You cut it in pieces. And then you got this. You got like a half. You got pieces about that long. You don't want them to be too long now. If it's if it's really really big you may have to cut it in half and then cut it in half again and cut little pieces okay. You don't want it to be too big. The reason why you don't want it to be too big. Oh and you have to wash it. The leeks because it grows under the ground. It's full of sand. You have to wash it. You know what I do. I clean it. I cut it right. No no I mean I cut it and then I put it in a bucket of water and I mix it all up and all the sand falls in the bottom and then I strain it to make sure there's no sand. Okay so my leek is ready. The onion I'm going to show you how to cut it. And then I got shallots. Look at this shallots. I mean look at this thing. I mean this is my onion family. You know they're all onion. This is the leek. It's an onion. It's got a root. It grows in the ground. This is the shallots. Shallots is also an onion. It's part of the leek family. And then there's a badalio onion and which is a sweeter onion but it's in May, June, July, August only from Georgia. And that's why I'm from Georgia. Did you know that? Anyway so shallots and leeks and onion and regular onion. I'm using this Spanish onion. I'm going to show you how to cut it all right. So let me go back to this. How do we cut this? Okay because for an onion soup we don't want them to be too big. If it's too big of a pieces of the onion it's not going to fit on your spoon. Remember you're going to eat with a spoon so you don't want the long pieces of onions going to hang off your spoon when you when you eat it. Otherwise it's going to be sloppy and I don't know about you but when I eat I usually you can tell what I have for lunch just by looking at my shirt. So I have to be careful. So look to clean it very simple okay. We're going to remove the top and we're going to remove the ends. All right very simple. Then I remove the skin and I use my paring knife to do it. Okay it's in. Look everybody's got their way of doing it. We have an onion video in there and a lot of you have seen it because we got like six, seven million view on it. So I know you've seen it. Everybody's got their way of doing it. Ah don't cut it this way. Don't cut it this way. We're going to do an onion 2.0. Very simple here friends. What we're going to do is we're going to cut the onion. You always always follow the line. You never cut the against the line the the line of the onion unless you're making onion rings right. So now we're going to cut it right and now at this point I could go boom boom boom boom boom like this right boom boom boom boom boom. I could go like this but then guess what would happen. I would have onion pieces too big. They're not going to fit in my spoon. You have to think of that right. What are you doing it for? What are you cutting it for right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut against the grain two times okay. You can see that two times right and then I'm going to put it like this and I'm going to cut it just like this. A child could do this okay. Now look look when I get to over there and move it around. We're going to cut it and then we push that aside and we'll go like this. Now remember it's a soup okay and and why did I cut them this way? I cut them this way because now I'll have little pieces then they're going to be they're not going to get stuck on my spoon. The biggest piece is going to be this one right there you see and they'll be perfect right. All right so now the different thing let me get my scraper. I got a scraper right there because you never use the knife right. So now friends when you make a caramelized onion you know I have a bunch of videos on on different things with onion. When you make a caramelized onion look at my caramelized onion video you'll see right. I poach them in their own water and then I caramelize them. When you make an onion soup very different. See they're all cut already. When you make an onion soup it's very different. You caramelize them first and then you cook them in the soup. Caramelize them first voila. They're caramelized I'm going to show you how we get there right. We're going to caramelize them but they're not cooked. They're beautiful but they're not cooked all right. So now we're going to cook them in the soup. So really simple you get your pan going you can put a little butter. Be careful butter is going to burn but the onion water is going to protect them so don't worry. All right a little bit of butter. I love my butter. This is going to be good let me tell you. You know the onion soup recipe has to be one of the most requested recipes. Show us how to make an onion soup. There you go onion soup coming up. This is great for the holidays let me tell you. Onion soup I'm going to show you the serve the classical way you know with the cheese and the crouton in a crock and then we'll if you don't have a crock we're going to put them in a plate. I'll show you how to do the plate too. I'll show you the whole thing it's very simple. All right first we're going to put the onion in the pan and then and then I'm going to show you how to make the whole thing. Okay so so make sure the pan is really nice and hot and we're going to take the onion and we're going to caramelize them. Okay but now basically all I'm going to do is I'm going to get them like these guys. All right so now we're going to do we're going to let the onion do their thing. Let me start with the pot where the soup is. At home you can do everything in the same pot except I'm telling you it goes a lot faster if you saute the onion on a fry pan than in a pot to caramelize them. It goes a lot faster. All right so now what we're going to do friends we're going to make a little roux. So you want to put a little butter in there. Measure carefully. Measure carefully. You know everybody's always asking me about my bowl of butter. It's an emotional support. I need I need my butter in front of me. I love butter. Butter is good you know. Time magazine had an article uh eat butter. I'll show you. Show you the article. It's very old. No it's not at all really. Look it was um it was uh 2014. Not that long ago. Time life. Eat butter. You know how many times I read this? Look at this. It's a little old right now but eat butter. Scientists labored fight the enemy why they were wrong. Read the article. Butter is good for you. Look. All right. All right so friends we're gonna make a little roux okay. So we're melting butter and we're gonna put a little flour and we're gonna have this beautiful roux. Okay we're gonna cook it a little bit. I'm making a soft roux and a soft roux is uh it's still a little liquid okay. All right now you know I show you the trick when I make the beef stew where I put the flour in a strainer. You can do that also if you want to. Okay it's really up to you. I like it on a soft roux. I don't know. I hope you can see inside the pot friends. Okay this is a soft roux. Maybe it needs a little more butter. What do you think? Don't be shy. If somebody complain it's too much butter in your food just don't invite them again. Time to go to um those lovely restaurant. They don't use butter they use margarine. Yeah go in there. No problemo. Look guys we're cooking the roux a little bit okay. See soft roux. The reason why I do a soft roux friends is because it's gonna be easy, much easier to incorporate it to the rest of the stuff I'm putting in. You watch that old soup is gonna be the best you've ever had. So a little butter or flour. See soft roux. Then we're gonna put the onion on top. Then we're gonna put stock. All right now let me tell you about my stock. Oh the onion right there still sauteing. See it takes a long time friends to give them nice color. Remember that's the whole idea. We gotta give them color. They gotta get golden brown okay. This is how you flavor. It's very important. You gotta get them caramelized. Look how beautiful that is. They gotta be caramelized okay. Otherwise they got no flavor. Okay this is how you get flavor to an onion. You caramelize. You don't want to put raw onion in your soup okay. So look guys we got the roux right there that is cooking. I don't want to cook it too much otherwise I'm gonna burn it right. So here's what we're gonna do friends. You ready? We're gonna put the onion right on top of the roux. Let me tell you something. You want a good onion soup? Stick around folks. This is gonna be the best onion soup you've ever had I promise. All right so we got onion. We got leeks. We're gonna put the leeks right on there. Well look at this one. Look at this one. Boy there you go. And a cook. All right shallots. We're gonna saute them a little bit with the onion. Right there we got a little shallots. I'm gonna put more onion. You can never have too much onion right. Listen. Listen you're listening. You're right there. You're with me. We'll put a little chicken stock in there friends. Chicken stock. Now if you're cooking for a vegan, God bless you for your patience and your kindness and your consideration because it's very nice. It's tough to cook for vegans you know because they don't eat that much stuff. I mean they eat a lot of stuff but anyway we're not gonna go there. Beef stock. Yeah beef stock friends. Beef broth, beef stock, whatever you may have right. All right beef broth, chicken broth. Look how beautiful that is. Okay we make our own. We got a recipe online where you can get it. Okay chicken stock. I'm doing a new video on chicken stock. I gotta save some room for all them onion. Okay now I'm gonna put some sherry. I like to put a cream sherry. I use savory and or you can use Harvey's bristol cream. I buy the family size bottle. Harvey's bristol cream is good. A little bit sherry in there. You don't want to put booze in there. You don't have to put booze. Okay just put more stock. Don't don't you know don't don't worry about it. Measure carefully okay. Don't be giving them too much booze now and you know what I like to use it a porto. I use a ruby porto. Not a tony a ruby. This you have to measure carefully okay. So one more thing. We're gonna put salt and pepper. All right look. So now remember very important friends. Salt and pepper. I use uh a salt and pepper because my stock is homemade. There's no sodium. Be careful because you're gonna if you buy a store-bought chicken stock or a beef broth you are going to have some um salt in there. Three four five hundred milligrams of sodium per cup. So be careful. Be very careful friends because you already got plenty of sodium in there okay. So we're gonna cook this. We're gonna cook it and cook it and cook it and then we're gonna put more onion in there. It's an onion soup right and then we're gonna put a little more stock. Just a little bit more stock and then we're gonna bring it to boil and then we're gonna let it cook. It's gonna cook about uh about an hour and a half an hour and a very very low blue blue blue blue. Very little. Don't be out there and bring it to you bring it to boil. Yeah you bring it to boil and the second it's boiling reduce it down and cook it very slowly. Okay all right. You don't want to go too fast. Now look we're caramelizing the onion right there and then we're gonna put them in. Okay now for those of you that don't want to make a roux you know you can put the uh you can put the strainer in there and get a little thicker right. Like I do in my beef stew. In case you haven't seen the video for the beef stew I'll show you. Let me get let me get this going just a little bit more right. I want to show you the trick of the in case you didn't see the beef stew recipe. Let me get a whisk uh not a whisk a uh a strainer and I gotta get a whisk. I got whisk. I got a lot of whisk. Look look look I love whisk. How many whisk you got in your kitchen? I gotta draw just whisk. All right I like my cooking tools friends. All right look look at the onion caramelize them caramelize them caramelize them. They be sweeter. Okay that's for those of you that have not seen the uh okay they caramelize they're good. Now we're going. Now we're going in. Now we're going in because I want to finish this recipe. I want to get it going. I want to cook it so you guys can uh all right so look at this. We're gonna cook this. We're gonna put a little more stock just a little bit more stock right there. We'll have to adjust the salt and pepper toward the end. Okay put whatever you want. My stock is beautiful because it's got tomato in there. See when I make a tomato paste. So I like it. Let me just maybe just a little bit more. You can never have too much and you know what make enough because this you don't make a little batch of tomato or onion soup. You make a huge batch because you know what you can freeze it. It'll freeze up for 17 years. I don't know about 17 years but a long time I promise you. So if you don't want to make a rule or let's say you made a rule and it's still not very thick you can put a little flour in there at this point. I'll show you how to do it. Okay you can take it that's if you want to just a little thicker. You want to take a strainer right there right. This I use it when I do the beef stew but if you didn't see the beef stew you don't know. Right take a little flour in there friends right just like this and then you take it and you mix it up and you see look it gets incorporated beautifully you see. So just in case you know you didn't you didn't have enough thickness because you gotta have the right bite for an onion soup. It can't be liquid it can't be like water you know what I mean. So look you see how beautiful it incorporated and now it's gonna cook. Now we're gonna cook the flour test out right. We're just gonna cook it cook it cook it. Oh mamma mia it's still very hot. You see so now friends we're gonna cook this and then we're gonna adjust it. The soup has to have the right texture. Remember it's all about the tongue. If I give you a soup it's too like water it's no good. If I give you a soup too thick it's no good either. It's gotta have the right texture. It's gotta stay in your test buds long enough to communicate the right flavor to the brain. Remember texture is the conductor of flavor. It's really important and you got the right texture for a soup for a stew for a dressing for anything. You gotta have the right texture. Mamma mia I'm burning the whole thing. All right friends we're gonna let this cook and we'll come back and we're gonna show you the different way to serve it okay. Okay friends well this soup has been cooking for a good hour hour and a half. Okay you take your time you cook however long you want. I like the onions to still be a little firm you know so they have a little texture to it but not crunchy okay. This is not like a al dente pasta okay. We want the onion to be very soft and look at the texture. Look at this texture folks. You see the texture? It's not watery. I hate it when soup is watery okay. It has to have texture so you know it's all on the tongue. Remember it's all the tongue okay. 8,000 nerve endings on top of your tongue folks. All about the tongue okay. So you gotta satisfy the tongue. If it's too liquid the food goes right through the tongue and go what happened? I'll tell you what happened. You ate something that was too liquid. Okay so we have to slow down the process. All right so look you can serve it in a beautiful plate just like this. Look look soup plate okay. I love serving it in a soup plate just like that. Very simple right. This is a family style okay. Very simple right. You serve it just like this. Then you take it. I made it all baguette Swiss cheese crouton. That's it. You want to put two of them you put two of them okay. This is one way to serve it. Very simple. The other way is to serve them in a crock. This is the old-fashioned crock. This is like you find them in antique shops. Oh the new one today though a little more elegant right. A little more elegant right there and then so you serve it in a crock. You still do the same there but I show you how to put the cheese on it okay. You want to use a Swiss cheese. You see look right there. So that's an easy way to do it right there. The first one that I do you fill them up all the way to the top right. Then you take it a crostini. They're just plain plain little toast baguette. French baguette right. Put it in there on the top. Cover the whole top. Cover the top. If you don't cover the top the um the cheese gonna fall right. Plus that's part of the deal. They're delicious right. And then you take some Swiss cheese or Avadi cheese whatever cheese you want. And remember the cheese got to be on the bowl and it's got to be on the side of the bowl too. Because then it falls and it stays and the crouton is holding the cheese. And then you bake it in the oven okay. I got one already in the oven that I did in the magic of television. I'm gonna go to my oven. You see right there. Oh yeah baby. Oh yeah. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Let me put it right there okay. It's probably gonna be a little hot so and let me put it. Oh let me get a towel and I'm not been drinking. There we go. Look look look right there. Oh be careful it's hot. Careful. And voila. That's another way of serving it okay. That's more of a classic way to serve it. That's more of a a new way of doing it. It doesn't matter how you serve it. Just serve it pretty. And and and let me tell you. You can freeze it. This is a beautiful onion soup. Very simple. Oh you know what you could do? You can uh sprinkle a little bit of chives also. Fresh chives on top of it. That's another onion. You know the chives is another onion. Just say obviously I don't have that many chives right here. But chives that's another onion. So now we got four onion. We got uh onion, shallots, leeks and chives at the end. And this remember never cook chives. You put them at the end. The steam of a dish is enough to release the flavor of it. And this right there friends. It's a beautiful onion soup. Very simple. You go right ahead and either way you serve it. You're gonna love it. It's wonderful. I remember made extra because they freeze delicious. It freezes like 17 years. I don't know how many years but it freezes a long time. Make a great onion soup. And don't forget ring the bell so you get a notification every Thursday when we put up a new video. Gives this gives us a thumbs up if you like that video. And don't forget to subscribe. We need subscribers. Thanks for watching our video.