French Onion Soup

Storing and Planning Ahead

The soup base keeps 4 days refrigerated and freezes 3 months. Always grill the cheese topping fresh; it does not reheat.

How to Make French Onion Soup

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1. Melt the butter with the oil in a wide, heavy pot. Add the onions, sugar and salt, cover, and sweat over medium-low heat for 15 minutes until collapsed and juicy.

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2. Uncover, raise to medium and cook for 30 to 40 minutes more, stirring every few minutes and scraping the base as it browns. The onions should end up jammy and the colour of dark caramel.

   Mark done Start 30 min timer

3. Whenever a dark crust builds on the base, add 2 tablespoons of water and scrape it up. Repeat throughout — this is the single most important technique in the recipe.

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4. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute, then stir in the flour and cook 2 minutes.

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5. Pour in the wine and brandy, scrape the base, and simmer until reduced by half.

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6. Add the stock, thyme and bay. Simmer gently, partly covered, for 30 minutes. Taste and adjust the salt.

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7. Toast the baguette slices until dry and crisp on both sides.

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8. Ladle the soup into ovenproof bowls, float two toasts on each, and pile the Gruyère on top, letting some fall onto the rim where it will crisp.

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9. Grill 12 cm from the element for 4 to 5 minutes until bubbling, blistered and brown in patches. Serve at once, warning everyone that the bowls are lethal.

   Mark done Start 4 min timer

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Tips for Success

• Slice the onions with the grain, root to tip. They hold their shape through the long cook instead of dissolving.
• Homemade or good-quality stock matters enormously here; there is nothing else to hide behind.
• The dried-out toast is deliberate — fresh bread turns to mush the moment it hits the broth.

Why the Method Is What It Is

Onions must be cooked slowly enough for their sugars to caramelise rather than burn — a process that genuinely takes 45 minutes and cannot be shortcut. Deglazing repeatedly with small splashes of liquid dissolves the fond and redistributes it, which is why the finished soup is brown all the way through rather than merely brown on top.

Good Alongside

A dry Alsatian Riesling or the same white you cooked with · Serve as a starter, or with a green salad as a light supper · Follow with a lemon tart

Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Fougasse, French Lentils, One Pot Ratatouille.

Common Substitutions & Variations

• An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.
• A dry vermouth keeps for longer than an open bottle of white wine and is the closer swap than a random white left in the fridge; for an alcohol-free version, use the same amount of stock with a squeeze of lemon.

What's in a Serving

Per serving, an approximate calculation from the ingredient list. Treat it as a rough guide: all the alcohol is counted, though some is lost in cooking; part of the energy comes from foods, or weights per item, with no recorded source. The calories include 7 g of alcohol a serving, which is not part of the protein, carbohydrate or fat. How the figures are worked out.

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