Classic French Onion Soup Recipe: Step-by-Step Guide

2 tablespoons olive oil or Butter
3 large sliced onions
5 cups beef broth
2 tablespoons Red Wine
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 pinch salt and pepper to taste
4 slices cubed toasted bread
1/2 cup shredded Swiss cheese
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese

Heat olive oil in an 8-quart stock pot over medium heat. Add onions and continually stir until tender, translucent and golden brown (about 30 minutes). Add beef broth, wine, and thyme. Season with salt and pepper. Let simmer for at least 30 minutes. Ladle soup into oven-safe serving bowls and place cubes of bread on top of soup. Layer each bowl with Swiss and Parmesan cheese. Broil on high for 2-3 minutes or until cheese starts to bubble and brown. Serve Hot.

He hey hello there goodtimers sure has been a while since we’ve done one of these as you can tell cuz I opened the refrigerator it’s time for a little cooking with Andy today’s episode is dedicated to my mom let me tell you a little bit of a story here so couple

Weeks ago for Valentine’s Day my mother decided to be nice to uh make my father his favorite French onion soup so she went to the convenience store she bought a package of french onion soup it had some directions on there said to add a little bit of this a little bit of that

So anyway she makes it all up according to the package directions gives it to my father he proceeds to take a couple of bites tries his best to pretend it’s good but ultimately decides he needs to tell her that it’s one of the worst things he’s ever

Tasted so that obviously didn’t go over very well he ended up uh taking most of it and I think he disposed of it pretty quickly sorry Ma so what I’m going to do for you today is I’m going to make my homemade version nothing store bought

French onion soup so you guys that love french onion soup take a look at this it’s actually pretty easy to do so this one is for you Mom and for you Dad hope you guys enjoy it let’s go to the Kitchen All right guys so first things first French onion soup obviously what you need is onions so french onion soup actually takes a bunch of onions um this recipe calls for six large onions I’ve got like these super sized things right here so I’ve only got three of them but

Yeah if they’re medium to large onions you’re probably going to want six for a nice big batch of french onion soup if not you know use a little bit less onions obviously but yeah we’re going to go for three big sweet onions here and these are actually videlia onions those

Are pretty sweet and they’ll obviously get sweeter as they caramelize so we’re going to Julian these into little slices and then we’re going to slow cook them right in the uh Dutch oven that I have here until they’re nice and brown then we’re going to add the other ingredients

For our soup so let’s get to cutting these up first okay guys through the magic of Television you can see that all of our onions are now cut up and I always do this handy little thing here where I get myself either a bowl or plate to put all

My scraps in so that’s where all the Skins are there and then I ran out of room on my cutting board so I had to put some of the sliced onions in there so six large onions or three in my case does seem like a lot but that stuff has

Going to cook right down um as soon as we start the oil here on the Dutch oven so I got myself a dutch oven right here and we’re going to go to a medium high heat here to start with and then as soon as we get the onions

Sautéing we’re going to turn it down so to this pan we’re going to add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and I’ve bought myself this butterf flavored olive oil which you can find online um to replace the butter in the recipe so a lot of these French onion recipes do

Call for a butter olive oil mix I’m going to go straight olive oil but it is butter flavored so we’ll get that same kind of flavor here but it’ll be a little bit healthier so let’s go ahead and get these onions started they’re actually going to take probably about 40

Minutes to sauté we’re going to go low and slow here guys to get the full flavor out of them and once they’re nice and brown We’ll add all of our broth and wine and all that good stuff so as you can see guys all of our onions are in

Here now we barely had enough room for all of them here in my small Dutch oven but those are going to cook down a lot to be probably about half that amount in there once they cook down like I said it’s going to take about 40 minutes

We’re going to stir them every few minutes here and they should hopefully become a nice Brown now if you need help caramelizing your onions you can add a little teaspoon or so of sugar that will also help caramelize them but I’m trying to keep this a little bit lower calorie

A little bit healthier for us so I probably will not be adding any sugar we’re just going to go right with the natural sweetness of the onions so we’re going to let this cook down for about 40 minutes and while we’re doing that we’re also going to cut up some bread those of

You that love french onion soup know that some of the best part of it is the bread and the cheese on top what I’m going to do today though is I’m going to make some croutons cuz I think that’s a little bit easier to eat instead of

Having a whole entire slice of bread on top of a bowl of soup this way here you get a little bit of bread within every bite so let’s go ahead and show you that all right guys so what I’ve got here is just some uh pieces of the ends

Of the bread that I had left over from a couple of bread slices earlier and we’re just going to use those to make croutons with and we’re just going to go probably a small dice here on your bread this probably would be easier if I

Had a St knife but I don’t want to dirty another knife so we’re just going to use this one and we’re going to go little bite-sized pieces once we get this bread cut up we’re going to go right into the air fryer with it to crisp up the

Croutons cuz you’ll want everything to be crispy on top of your soup nobody wants soggy bread and this bread is frozen solid guys so it’s taking a little bit of extra muscle here to cut this and like I said if you want to leave your bread whole by all means

Definitely do that there’s all kinds of variations on French onion soup you’ll find different recipes call for lots of different things some recipes will call for wory sheer sauce some will call for white wine instead of red some will call for butter instead of oil some will call

For a combination of both also cheeses vary greatly in your uh french onion soup some places will use mozzarella others will use provolone others will use Grier or swiss and Parmesan so you can put basically whatever kind of cheese you want on top today I’m going

To be doing Swiss and I probably mix in a little bit of uh parmesan as well so it’s a little bit of a blend so back to the croutons though I’ve got the same bowl that I used to put the onions in here a second ago we’re just going to

Add the bread to that and to the bread we’re going to add a little bit of seasonings too cuz you want to have some flavor there we’re going to go that olive oil that we used earlier for the onions add a little bit of that to the [Applause]

Bread so just a dash and we’ll give it a nice toss that’ll just help Brown the bread once it’s in the uh air fryer and there’s what the croutons look like guys once they’ve been toasted up now remember it’s okay to have them a little bit dark because you do want them nice

And crispy because you’re going to be putting them into liquid which means they’re not going to stay crispy for very long so nobody likes soggy bread so make sure you toast those up real good in your air fryer you can also pan fry them guys if you don’t have an air fryer

Just add a little bit of oil to a frying pan and stir them until they are basically as golden as you’d like them all right back to our onions now guys as you can see they’re already starting to shrink down so you don’t want to try to

Brown these too much you want them just be kind of translucent and golden um once they cook down then we’re going to De glaze this with some wine and beef broth so probably another half an hour or so on these onions we’re going to continue to stir them every couple of

Minutes just to make sure they’re not overcooking make sure you keep that at about a medium heat and yeah just keep right on stirring all right guys as you can see now we got a nice golden hue on these onions here they are very very soft

Almost to the point of being kind of mushy and disintegrated which is kind of what you want that means all that flavor and all that sweetness has come out of them now once again if you want to add Just A Pinch of Sugar you can to make it

A little bit sweeter and to help Brown those but basically they’re going to Brown all on their own with just a little bit of time this took about uh 30 minutes or so of uh pretty much continuous stirring and uh that’s what you have so now we are going to mix up

Some beef broth along with our our red wine and a little bit of uh seasonings and then we’re going to pour that right on in here all right guys so what I like to use is called better than bullion all right it’s tends to be a little bit

Stronger than your regular old generic boxed beef broth has a little bit more richness it’s actually seasoned with real Roast Beef in vegetables so this is what I like to use you’re going to use 1 teaspoon of this for every 8 oz of water all right so just one teaspoon there two teaspoons

Maybe and three teaspoons all right if that’s not strong enough we’ll add a little bit more I’m going to taste it first after we get the water mixed in here as you noticed I wasn’t using a real precise measurement cuz that’s how I roll I’m a

Rebel like that so we want five cups total here I’ve got myself an 8 cup measuring cup here Four and that’s about five right there now I just added cold water to this guys if you add hot water the uh brief broth will dissolve a lot better it’ll def do a lot less stirring but I didn’t do that obviously so we’re just going to mix that up a

Little bit call it good stir stir stir all right so to that we’re going to add two tablespoons of dry red wine uh you can use Sherry if you like right now today I’m actually going to use Cabernet Savignon cuz I already have one opened but honestly it doesn’t really matter that

Much also when it says two tablespoons if you want to use more definitely go ahead that’s up to you I’m probably going to use a little bit more anyway I’m just going to dump that right into the water here guys to make it easy just

Pour it all in at once and yeah that’s probably a lot more than two tablespoons but you know it’s going to work out great trust me all right and we’re going to do probably about a teaspoon or so of time once again I’m just going to eyeball it and that’s probably about

Right okay obviously if you want to measure it up for real you can oh and we don’t want to forget the salt and pepper in here as well once again we’re going to start off with just a little and we’ll adjust our seasonings once we get everything combined and

Tasted you can always add more but it’s hard to uh take it back out if you’ve over seasoned especially salt also this uh better than bullion is pretty salty guys so be aware of that go a little bit light on the salt to start with if you

Need to add more then you can do so later so all right we’re going to go right into the onions with this and just pour it right on in there then once we got it all in and hopefully it all fits there we go get the rest of the broth out

There then we’re going to crank up the heat we’re going to let this come to a boil and then we’re going to turn it back down to a simmer then at that point we’re going to taste it to see if we need more uh broth or not

And guys we have been stirring this now and simmering it for about an hour and this is what the final product or almost final product looks like but there is one more thing you need to do on your French onion soup and that is melt the

Cheese all right so what we’re going to do is we’re going to Ladle this into some of these nice fancy ramkin soup dishes I have going to throw the croutons on top the croutons remember those and then we’re going to top it with a Swiss cheese and parmesan cheese

Blend and then we’re going to throw it under underneath the broiler for probably 2 3 minutes maybe just until the cheese has melted and browned up a little bit so let’s go ahead and get that taken care of for you we are going to just eyeball it and I’m going to put

The amount of cheese I like in it first of all we’re going to get these pretty well full make sure you get a little bit of broth and some onion in there both there we go so that’s just like that all right so let’s get those probably

Fill them up to about a half an inch from the top guys then we’re going to go ahead and like I said you can do Swiss you can do provolone you can do Grier which is basically Swiss uh you can do parmesan mozzarella whatever kind of cheese you like on top of here

Traditionally it’s Grier or swiss cheese we’re going to go ahead and do a little bit of Swiss and a little bit of Parmesan I’m going to start start with just the Swiss here all right a little bit into this one got some on the sheet pan so

Someone’s going to kill me cuz she’ll have to clean that all right so we got a Little Bit of Swiss don’t worry guys we’re going to put a little bit more on but we’re going to go some croutons first all right and a handful of croutons in this

One and let’s go with a few more cuz who does love bread right and then we’re going to do a little bit more Swiss right on top there and a little bit more over Here and then some Parmesan I like parmesan guys cuz that’s going to make a really nice crust all right that is all there is to it and then we are going to throw the broiler button on the oven here let that heat up for just a second then we’re going to

Throw this right underneath the broiler till it’s nice and bubbly and I’m just using a sheet pan here guys just to help me with the uh soup getting it in and out of the oven all right just like that underneath the broiler and let’s let it cook [Applause] All right guys and we’ve got the star of the show here even though she hasn’t been seen until right now but Simone pickles is here her favorite soup by the way is French onion so this is a a little stressful for me to see what she

Thinks oh we got a good cheese bow that’s a good start it looks hot I got to blow on yeah it is it is hot yes all right very good all right two thumbs up two thumbs up soupy beepy on Plenty of onions in there for you oh yes Simone is

The onion Queen raw cooked love onions fried baked oh you know pickled onions are good too pi yeah sorry I forgot pickled so all kinds of onions so she doesn’t just like pickles guys she likes onions as well but Simone onions doesn’t have quite the same ring as Simone

Pickles I suppose so sounds like I would smell funny that would smell funny yeah all right so it’s onion approved and pickles approved two thumbs up guys hopefully you can make this if you have any uh comments you’d like to put down put them down below I’ll post the recipe

For you as well in the description so you guys can follow along but yeah it’s actually a pretty easy soup to make just takes a little bit of time and love and uh there you go french onion soup until next time guys have a good time have a good time thanks for joining

Us yeah we’ll just wait for him and then I’ll just cut that out it’s like he doesn’t even know we’re trying to make a video yeah you all done sir so we can make a video now good delicious okay and now we can make a video let’s have a

Drink just relax all your problems will fade if you’re ready for a good time count on me there’s a party in the backyard Dan your problem