REAL Classic French Onion Soup - THE FULL MONTY! (professional Michelin Star restaurant recipe)

French onion soup is another example of a classic recipe that has died the death of a thousand cuts as people are making it with pre-packaged beef stock and putting tons of sugar in it. Sugar has no place in French onion soup. Even the formidable Ramon Blanc was seen thickening the soup with flour in a video. There is no flour in this recipe when it is properly made. Thickening If you look at the edge of the onion, you'll see that the outer layer of it is tougher than the inner layers. For this, you need to do what's sometimes called a deep peel. You're going to not just take the brown skin off, but we're going to actually take this whole layer that's just below the skin off because this is this is going to remain tough. It won't break down. You'll have this is where your stringy bits will come from. You can save this and use it as onion in stocks and other things, but you can't use it for this. Okay, now we get rid of this part too. Now this onion, this inner onion, this is what we want. We want to repeat that for all the rest of them. Okay, now I've got all the onions deep peeled. Now this is one of those things I kind of assumed everybody knew this, but I recently found out that they didn't. The direction that you cut an onion will influence how it tastes in the end. If you cut it in this direction, if you cut it into rings like this, it will be harsher tasting because you'll have broken up more of the cells. So for French onion soup, it's always traditional to cut along this line and we're only going to cut these into fourths. You can see where the root is. So you're going to get rid of the root just by cutting it into fourths. We want to make as few cuts as possible. Get rid of that center section. That's no good either. And then you can see where the root is. Just make your second cut to divide the quarters right along that root. This means that you've made the absolute minimum number of cuts that you need to make into the onion. And there we have the part of the onion that we're going to use and we're not going to cut it any more than this. This will result in a very sweet and smooth soup and we won't have to add any sugar at all to this. And sometimes, Mother Nature being the bitch that she is, sometimes she makes an onion like this that doesn't want to conform. So you find the root and you just manually cut it out like this. A little V-cut like that. This is also fine. This is what you don't want though. You don't want these pieces with the root in them. And when you get that, you put them all in a braising dish like this. And then we've got some butter here. This is the butter. You can add a little bit of olive oil to this and microwave it up in order to melt the butter. We've got the butter melted now. I'm just going to drizzle it over the top of these. You don't have to worry about it too much because as it braises, it's going to mix around on its own. And I'm also going to put in a couple of bay leaves. We'll have to fish those out later. And now just put a lid on it and begin the braising. Okay, it's been braising for three hours now. You can see the onions are turning yellow. There's a little bit of caramelization on them. And the beauty of this, I didn't add any water. All the liquid you see in here is the onion juices themselves. So I'm just going to turn these around a little bit. Make sure everything's even. And I'm going to put them back. I removed the bay leaves, by the way. I'm going to put these back in the oven again. Now uncovered. No cover on them for just a little while longer. After half an hour, we'll do another stir. It's getting darker, as you can see. And we're going to put it in for the final time back in. And this has been 30 minutes. These onions are pretty nicely caramelized here without having actually gone dark and nasty. These are in a good state to have the onions. They're dark and caramelized. They're going to go into a food processor with a teaspoon of dried thyme and a little bit of the stock. Just to help it along a little bit. This is the beef stock that we're going to cook the soup with. We'll put a little bit of it in to help it process. And again, we're not looking to puree the onions, of course. We want some cheap pieces in there. And that's good. This is enough. Now this gets mixed back in with the rest of the stock and starts getting heated for making the soup. Okay, we're going to remove the hard part. We don't want to use minced garlic for on a heat of 5 on 1 to 10. We're going to cook these. And the butter's melted. It's just starting to cook. We're going to turn it over. Use the other side to soak up the rest of the butter. And keep cooking it. Meanwhile, the soup is simmering away. And one of the mistakes I see people making is to start putting sherry and vinegar and other ingredients in it at this point. You add those at the end. You just want to finish it so you can taste what it is that you're doing. The same thing for salt. We're going to let this cook for the full 20 or 30 minutes before we're going to start seasoning it. Okay, it's been a few minutes now. Now this side that's got most of the butter is going to be the one that's going to get most of the toasting. So you're going to turn it back around. It's still got that low heat on it. I'm going to put the cheese on top. This can be done ahead of time. You can make this part up. In fact, you should make this part up ahead of time. And then I'm going to turn the heat down even lower. I'm turning it down to a 3 on 1 to 10 now. We're just going to let this sit there until the cheese melts over the top of it and the bottom of the bread gets really nice and toasty. So a few more minutes. Just watch it. Keep an eye on it until the cheese looks really nice and melted. And this is the stage we're looking at for the cheese croutons. You can see the cheese is nicely melted. They're very nice and golden on the other side. Don't forget these are going to go into the broiler to finish toasting the cheese. So this is a good stage to stop them at. You can set these aside. You can do a whole bunch of these in advance, however many you need. They'll stay just like that for hours. And then just stick them into the soup and flash them under the broiler to finish off the dish. Okay, this has been simmering away for just over 20 minutes. Now's the time we're going to begin seasoning and tasting to see what it's like. So I'm going to begin with some finely ground black pepper. The salt is probably the trickiest thing. It's actually a very important stage in this recipe. Too little and you won't have any flavor. Too much and it'll be nasty. You have to very carefully control your salt in this. Add a little bit at a time. Keep tasting. But before I even taste it, I'm also going to add about a good tablespoon or so of balsamic vinegar and maybe a tablespoon and a half of dry sherry. And usually Oloroso very rich sherry is what I prefer for most things. But in this case, this soup is so sweet already. These onions are so sweet that I don't want to add any more sugar by using a sweet sherry in it. You certainly never ever want to add sugar to this onion soup prepared this way. Be very careful. Taste it. You'll see it's already extremely sweet. Okay, I just tasted. This is good but it needs just a little bit more salt. But I'm going to add it gradually and carefully because I can tell you from experience this soup goes from being not salty enough to being sickeningly salty in a surprisingly little addition. So you have to really really watch your salt on this. It absolutely has to be salty. Put too much and you'll ruin it. Okay, that's about perfect. Now I'm going to spoon it into the ramekins, put the croutons on top and flash it onto the broiler. Also look for my cocktail book, Cocktails of the South Pacific and Beyond, Advanced Mixology, available through Amazon Online.