MAKE ONION SOUP FAST
Use some tricks to speed up caramelization, but stay close to the stove!
Few soups get people as mistyeyed as french onion.
Sure, I count myself among the many who cry while slicing pounds and pounds of onions.
But despite the waterworks, it’s hard to resist the result: a rich, fragrant, deeply coloured pot of comfort. The best renditions are so beautiful, they might bring a tear to your eye — at least metaphorically.
That’s the kind of recipe I’m presenting you with today. Even better, this quick soup from kitchen wizard and Serious Eats chief culinary adviser J. Kenji López-Alt doesn’t sacrifice flavour in the interest of time.
His method, which I culled from his impressive 2015 cookbook, The Food Lab (W.W. Norton), uses sugar, baking powder and increased heat to speed up the onion caramelization process.
The sugar (only 1 tbsp/15 mL, don’t worry!) contributes sweeter, deeper, faster-developing flavour.
Baking powder speeds up browning (that Maillard reaction you may have heard about) and leads to softer onions by breaking down the cells faster.
And heat? Well, naturally, food cooks faster at a higher temperature, and the addition of water here reduces the risk of burning and better distributes all the sugars. As the subtitle of the book says, “better home cooking through science.”
“If you’re willing to put in the work to make french onion soup the traditional way,” as in several hours, “it does develop different flavours,” López-Alt told me.
They’re not necessarily flavours that are better or worse than with the quicker approach.
But will most people be able to tell the difference when this recipe takes only about half an hour to caramelize the onions? (If you’re as deliberate with a knife as I am, it might take you less time to caramelize than to slice them.)
Certainly not, and it might not even be discernible to a typical palate in a side-by-side tasting. “They’re both good; they’re just a little different,” López-Alt says.
“Different” might not be the first word that comes to mind when you taste this soup. “Like velvet” was one taster’s observation, with the rest of the sentiments falling somewhere between “amazing” and “holy cow.”
Speaking of cow ... the deeply caramelized onions created such a rich, dark liquid that it prompted some to wonder whether the soup had been made with beef broth.
Nope. I got stunning results using a good store-bought chicken broth. And it wouldn’t be a huge leap to make this with a good vegetable broth if you prefer to keep things meatless.
“The broth is very important,” López-Alt says, but that does not mean you have to abandon the prospect of french onion soup at home if you don’t have homemade broth.
If you do, great. If not, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference there, either, when the onions do so much of the work for you.
Cooking the onions at a higher temperature requires a bit more hands-on work, as you have to make sure you aren’t burning them or the flavourful browning on the bottom of the pan.
The goal is to get everything as dark as possible without it turning black, López-Alt says. Medium-high is a relatively safe heat.
Even then, you might have to make adjustments, depending on your pan and stove top. You also must be vigilant about stirring the onions every few minutes, which is another safeguard, with the water, against scorching. It’s how you achieve even, robust colour, as well.
The only way a whole pot of this oniony bliss gets any better is if you top each portion with toasted bread and a generous layer of cheese. Tears of joy? Fine by me.
The only way ... this oniony bliss gets any better is if you top each portion with toasted bread and a generous layer of cheese.