Crockless French Onion Soup

It's been a while since I posted a recipe (mainly because I've been experimenting with things that are really hard to write about and recreate, curry among them). Anyway, because I love the film club I'm a president of so much, I decided that for our pot luck screening of La Reine Margot that I would make them french onion soup. This always sound more pretentious than I intend it to be, but I really haven't been able to eat french onion soup since I had soupe à l'oignon in Paris that I place on my list of the top five things I've ever eaten. So I realized that I was going to be disappointed no matter how good my soup ended up, but got over that fact pretty quickly.

Ingredients:

• 5 onions (Vidalia, mayan sweets, or just regular yellow or white onions)
• 3 tablespoons of butter (but more doesn't hurt...)
• Salt and pepper
  
• At least 2 cups of white wine
• 3 cups beef broth (can be made from bouillon)
• 2 cups chicken broth (can also be made from bouillon)
• A "bouquet garnis" of 1 tablespoon of herbes de provence and 1 bay leaf (see note)
• A baguette
  
• 1 cup of gruyere cheese (shredded)

Note: To make this "bouquet," I improvised... well, a lot. I put the herbs in a coffee filter and tied it off with kitchen string. The point is that you don't want little leafy bits floating around in your soup when it's done, so you use this little packet to get the flavors into the soup without having to skim the herbs off the top. I also toyed with the idea of putting them in my tea ball, so you might want to try one of those and just let the bay leaf go free in the soup (that's easy enough to pick out of anything).

Procedure:

1. Cut the tops and bottoms off the onions. With the bottom of the onion on the cutting board and the top facing up, make thin crescents out of the onion by cutting it as you would a pizza. But instead of making only a few "slices of pizza," make as many as you can manage (I averaged about 26 to 34 "slices" depending on how big the onion was. If you still have trouble visualizing what you're cutting, think of a bloomin' onion, but with smaller petals and cut all the way through.

2. Melt the butter in a large pot. When completely melted, add one layer of onion and lightly salt and pepper it. Add another layer of onion and salt and pepper it the same way, continuing until you run out of onion. Let sweat, covered, on medium low heat for 20 minutes without stirring them.

3. Remove lid and stir. Increase heat to medium and stir the onions occasionally until the onions are dark brown (not burnt, mind you, just really caramelized). This will take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour or beyond, depending on your stove, the onions, and the alignment of the planets, so just tend to them every couple of minutes.

3.5. While the onions are cooking, slice your bread into inch thick pieces. Lay those pieces out on a baking sheet and sprinkle with a layer of the gruyere cheese. Set them aside for now.

4. Once satisfied with the color of the onions, add enough white wine to the pot to cover the onions completely. Turn the heat on high and stir constantly until the wine turns syrupy in consistency (3 to 5 minutes, give or take, depending on how much wine you used).

Side note: The alcohol will cook out of this, that's pretty much what you're trying to do with the heat up so high. But as I learned, the alcohol cooking off goes somewhere, making billowing clouds of steam. Inhaling said steam is like breathing in vaporized alcohol. Just letting you benefit from my white wine facial experience a couple days ago.

5. When the wine has cooked down, lower the heat back down to a medium and add the beef and chicken broths, along with the bouquet garni. Once that's brought up to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer. Let simmer for 15 to 20 minutes.

6. Turn your oven's broiler on, and put the sheet with the cheese covered bread underneath the broiler. The bread should only be under there long enough to toast the cheese, so keep an eye on them and remove them before they get burnt, of course.

Serving:

You can probably tell by now, but this recipe has been adapted to suit the general population that doesn't have a set of matching mini crocks for traditional french onion soup. Instead, just take out the bouquet garnis and ladle out individual portions of soup into bowls, then sprinkle with as much of the leftover gruyere cheese as you want. Then plop a piece of the toasted bread (cheese side up) in the bowl and serve.

This version has at least a dozen servings, and can be increased very easily just by adding more onion or more broth. Every component can be stored separately and recombined when ready for any leftovers you might have.

Tips:

• Thinner pieces of onion are easier to get on a spoon.
• I've had good experiences with the "Better Than Bouillon" brand bouillon paste, but those little cubes work well too. For premade broth, I like cartons better than cans.
• Don't stand right over the pan when you add the wine. Really. It will be hard to see during that step anyway, so be prepared.
• Don't forget to take out the bouquet garnis.
• Deeper bowls work better than shallower bowls when serving.
• Your entire living space will smell delicious for a good 24 to 48 hours. Sorry, unintentional side effect.

My film club pot luck contribution was a big success, and resulted in leftovers for quite a while. That was pretty convenient when watching Julie & Julia the day after, craving both french food and blogging about it. So now I've satisfied both parts of that need.