Delicious French Onion Soup Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making French onion soup. So let's get started. To make this hearty, delicious soup, you'll want butter, onions, about three pounds of them, some beef stock, garlic, a little bit of all-purpose flour, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper, and brandy and a dry white wine. We're gonna top this off with some French bread and Gruyere cheese. First up, we're gonna slice these onions. It's four to six large onions, so about three pounds. However, these are onions we harvested from our veggie garden, and they're a little bit smaller than the ones you buy at the supermarket. Luckily, Brian bought some safety goggles because first things first, safety first. So now I can chop this. My eyes, my poor eyes, oh my gosh. I don't care how I look. I just wanna be able to chop all these onions or slice them thinly without crying. I was tearing up a storm. The funny thing is, if you're wearing contact lenses, your eyes are totally protected. So when I used to wear contacts, I was like, no, no, no, chopping onions, no concerns in the world. But if you wear glasses or don't have them on, your eyeballs are not happy. We harvested these onions in the fall, so the older the onions get, the more pungent they are. So we're gonna cut our onions between a quarter and an eighth of an inch thick. You don't want them to be too thick because they'll never caramelize. You don't want them to be too thin because they'll fall apart when they do caramelize. So just think for thinner pieces of onion. Oh yeah, it's foggy. There's like no wind here. This soup is so delicious that all of this is worth it. I'm not used to cutting circles of onions and I can see like if I do this, so it's fine. This soup is super cozy. It's one of my favorite things to eat. It just warms you up. The depth of flavor you get from the onions that are so caramelized and the brandy and the wine, it topped with cheese and that bread. Oh, it's just the most satisfying soup you could have, especially on a cold day. Okay, grab three cloves of garlic and give that a mince. Towards the end of your prep work, you're gonna be melting a quarter cup of butter right into a large pan, pot. Set that stove to medium heat. This is what my mom calls a drop of butter. Just drop right in. So my butter is melted. I'm adding in the onions now. The butter started to caramelize a bit, but that's fine. I love browned butter. We're also gonna add in half a teaspoon of salt to give this a start. Give this one little mix or two, and then you're gonna cover this up and cook for about five to six minutes or until the onions are slightly softened and starting to release some water. Aside from just being delicious, this recipe is so amazing because you can taste the love that you put into it when you made it. Look, my onions have softened a little bit. They're releasing some water. Now we're gonna leave this uncovered. Continue cooking on medium while we stir every few minutes for an hour. That's the deal. But yes, you have to be in the kitchen for an hour making this and kind of hovering around the pot. You don't have to be here the entire time, but you have to pass by every once in a while and just keep on stirring. If you see your onions burning, you can add like a tablespoon of water while you're stirring but you should be stirring kind of a lot. And then towards the end of the hour, you're gonna be stirring like every minute. So just don't walk away and forget about this. If you've ever seen a recipe where people talk about caramelized onions and they're like, oh, cook time, 20 minutes. They're lying to you. It's not true. To really caramelize an onion, you're taking all the sugars in that onion and breaking them down and just making them like, oh, golden and delicious. But that takes time. You cannot rush it. Even with like your baking soda tricks and all that sort of thing, you just have to like stir, time, and watch the color. We want this to go from being pale and white to a deep golden brown, a little bit browner than you even think they should be because when we add the stock in and everything else, it's gonna dilute the color and you want it to be like so rich and flavorful. It's like butter, onions, wine, ah, and cheese. This is like the best thing ever. I wish you could smell this. Just keep stirring for a few minutes or so. And then when we come back, you'll see the color's changed and I'll tell you what to do next. Just over an hour later, lots of time in the kitchen stirring away. Look at this beautiful, dark caramelized color. This is what you wanna see and this is when you know it's done. Look at that color. Now we're gonna add our minced garlic in as well as two tablespoons of all-purpose flour. Sprinkle that in and we're gonna mix it all together and cook while stirring constantly for a minute. We're stirring and cooking the flour. The garlic is going to start cooking as well but it'll finish during the simmer. Now we need a dry white wine. You can use cooking wine. I'm using a Sauvignon Blanc. One cup, 240 ml. We're gonna slowly pour this into the pan and while we do that, it's gonna deglaze the bottom. Look at all this delicious stuff at the bottom of the pan. That's flavor that we're gonna release with the wine. Warm up five to six cups of beef stock and we're gonna pour this into this mixture of onions and wine. Just mix it in. We're also gonna add our thyme sprigs, a bay leaf, and half a teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper. This smells so rich and lovely. I just, it's crazy how rich it is without having any meat in it at all. It's just the onion providing that flavor. I'm gonna bring this to a simmer over medium heat and then continue simmering for about 20 minutes. You'll notice the consistency changes. Just becomes velvety and rich. Right now, you have amazing onions in a broth, but it's gonna come together and you'll see that change in consistency. And if you haven't, stir, stir, stir the bottom and just kind of scrape the bottom just to make sure you get all those bits of flavor out. Escapable taste test, I am gonna add a bit more salt in for flavor. Different beef stocks have totally different amounts of salt, you might use low sodium or regular, so we always add a little bit of salt in the beginning and then more salt to taste towards the end of the recipe. While your soup's simmering away, we're gonna measure out three tablespoons of brandy right in here. We're gonna simmer this for a few more minutes so the brandy, like the alcohol, cooks off and it really melds in there. Here's the deal. You've been hanging out with this pot of onions for a long time. Chances are, if you're serving it for dinner or a dinner party or something like that, you don't wanna smell like onions and be bedraggled. So, you can make your soup in advance, just warm it up again when you're ready to serve. When you're ready to serve, set that oven to broil on high, it's about 500 degrees. Grate some Gruyere cheese, cut some slices of a baguette and grab some oven safe bowls. These have to go in the oven at really high temperature so make sure they're oven safe. Now, we're ready to fill up our bowls. All the time we took in caramelizing those onions was so worth it. Over here, we're gonna top it with some bread. You can completely cover your bowl in bread or leave some of it bare. Now, top with a quarter of a cup of that grated Gruyere cheese. Then repeat for the rest of the servings. Once your soups are assembled, we're gonna place these onto a baking sheet. You don't want things tipping over. It'd be really difficult to get them out otherwise. They're gonna go into the oven, high broil for about two minutes or until they're bubbly and just turning golden. That is so rich, hearty and just delicious. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe and I'll see you in the next video. If you like this video, check out my soup playlist.