The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Onion Soup

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Quiet luxury has been all the rage the past few years, but our girl Onion Soup has been out here epitomizing that s**t for literally hundreds of years. A bag of onions, some butter to sauté it in, beef broth are really all you need; throw in some stale bread and grated cheese, and you’ve got a million-dollar taste for ten dollars and change. (AND it doesn’t take as long as you think. Ask Kenji and Deb.) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey there, it's Robin. I'm so excited to tell you about Radiotopia's newest show, Hyperfixed. Hosted by former Reply All co-host Alex Goldman, Hyperfixed is a podcast where you, the listener, write in with your problems and Alex solves them. On Hyperfixed, he has tackled everything from the origin of a mysterious button to whether a listener should have kids or not. Nothing is too big or too small, provided there are some interesting stops along the way. Like, one thing that drives me nuts

is when traffic lights don't line up and cars going in all directions are just sitting at a complete standstill. Alex, help, why is this happening? Alex is, for better or worse, absolutely hung up on solving your problems and he will go to absurd lengths to try and resolve them. Help us welcome the newest show to the Radiotopia family.

Find Hyperfixed on your favorite podcast platform now. It's very grim, Kenji. I do not like this early sunset, cloudy days, cold weather. It just feels like maybe we should just make a big ol' pot of soup. Maybe we just need to make some cozy food. Maybe we should sit indoors and caramelize onions all day. Is that what you want to do? Let's just caramelize onions for four to seven hours like the internet says we should. At minimum.

Should we talk about how the internet is just wrong about onions in general? Everyone's wrong. Except for us. They don't take as long as they say and they also don't take as short as they say. Thank you very much. I cannot wait to get to that in the cooking segment. How everyone is wrong on the internet except for me and Kenji. Welcome back to our show.

From PRX's Radiotopia, this is the recipe with Kenji and Deb, where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk, and a columnist for The New York Times. Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen, and she's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We're both professional home cooks, which means we can and will make the same dish

57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe. And on this show, we're going to share our techniques and ingredients so that you can figure out what works best for you. This week, we're talking about... I think now, though, we can say, today on The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, we're going to be talking about...

French onion soup. French onion soup or just onion soup? It's really just onion soup. I bet they just call it onion soup in France. They call it le onion soup. Ha ha ha. Back when I was living in Brooklyn in a studio apartment and I was testing French onion soup,

and my dog, Hamon, who's a charpé, he passed away this past year, but he's a charpé, and you know, charpés are basically like a big pile of folded towels, and they have lots of cracks and crevices for absorbing odors. And I was living in a studio apartment with no ventilation and testing French onion soup recipes,

so for like two weeks, I was just caramelizing onions nonstop in this tiny apartment. But then for the next like three months after that, Hamon just smelled like onion soup. And Hamon can't, he can't eat onions, right? Dogs cannot eat onions. The utter cruelty of smelling like something he cannot eat. cruelty of smelling like something he cannot eat. But anyhow, we started singing to the tune of Come on Eileen. We would sing, Come on, come on, you smell like onion. And there's your onion soup pop culture reference. Onion soup is also one of my favorite foods. And it is a soup I make pretty often considering how much work it is.

But I feel like it is absolutely made for one of those chilly winter days that you don't want to go out anyway. But I've always liked, I like the simplicity of it. It's a bag of onions, it's some stock, it's some stale bread, and some cheese. There's something really beautiful about making something so complex from such a simple set of ingredients. So when you talk about something like the history

of French onion soup, you're basically asking how far back the idea of onions and soup go. Right. And it gets a little messy. Apparently it was Roman before it was French, not surprising at all. Well, onions are one of the, are not like a new world. Onions are one of those vegetables,

you go back to the ancient cookbooks, like the very first cookbooks, and there are onions in them, right? They're not like tomatoes where tomatoes just suddenly appeared in cookbooks. Exactly. Onions are widely grown, they're inexpensive. Julia Child says in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it's hard to imagine a civilization without onions. I like that.

I can't imagine a civilization without onions. I would be extremely uncivilized if I did not have access to onions. Sure, you know, and even, you know, working in restaurants for years, like, I would say onions are the vegetable I have worked with by far the most because they're the base for so many things. They're like the essential ingredient in any kind of mirepoix. They're essential in, you know, some form of onion is essential in all, in Chinese cuisine, in Japanese cuisine, like onions are just everywhere.

So yes, making a single soup out of them. It's wild. To just say, like, I'm going to take this bag of dusty onions from the cellar and I'm going to turn it into dinner is incredibly, it's budget friendly. It's practical. It's like making a suit out of socks. It also means quite often that you don't have to go to the grocery store, which is a very

compelling argument for making onion soup. You probably have a bag of onions around. The other compelling thing is that I've found onions these days are not even that cheap. You go to the grocery store and if you buy single ones by the pound, they're like, I don't know, in Seattle they're like a buck 49, a buck 59. But if you buy a five or 10 pound bag of onions, then you get them for like 79 cents a pound. Absolutely. You got to buy the bag.

Also, this is, we'll get into this when we get more into like the cooking tips, but I've always, I feel strongly if you're going to make onion soup or almost anything with onions, buy a few extra. First of all, onion soup is generally better when you add more onions. When in doubt, caramelize a couple extra onions. Second of all, I'm sure you've done that thing where you cut into the onion, it's got a little brown layer. You have no idea if it's, and I think it, I think the whole onion tastes bad.

It does, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it, and so it's gotta go. And so I always want, I'm glad I get a few extra. Like I'll always buy two bags if I need one. As soon as you have that little brown layer and some of the cells inside the onion starts sort of like rupturing and breaking, then you start developing those really funky, like, sulfury, really strong, like, it tastes

like an onion that's been cut and sitting cut for a few days. But not in that mild way. It just smells like a lot. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Real strong, yeah. No, no, you can't use those onions for that. But, you know, the thing I love about onion soup and the reason why I find it so compelling, one of the reasons why I find it so compelling is that you start with a five pound bag of onions.

You start with a giant pile of onions that don't fit into a single pot and then they reduce down to, you know, there's no clearer visual example, I think, of the transformation of flavor through heat and the concentration of flavor through heat, right? Because you're starting with this giant pile of things and you're turning it down

and you're turning it into, and you're turning it into a very small pile of things that's just much, much more intensely flavored. And it shows you not just sort of like reduction and sort of the concentration of flavor, but it's also like a really good demonstration of the Maillard reaction and caramelization and how that can develop flavors,

how sweetness develops in the onions, how those brown flavors all come out through the slow, slow cooking of them. Wait, can you explain the Maillard reaction? Maillard? I always said Maillard. Give a duck. Can you speak to me like I'm five years old?

I love that Reddit. The Maillard reaction. Yeah. Explain it to me like, explain it to me like I'm five years old. So like you're five years old. Okay. So imagine that you have just built a big city out of Legos. Right.

And those are, they're all sitting in your living room, right? You got a bunch of big Lego structures, like a bunch of castles, a bunch of spaceships, and those are sort of like your large proteins and sugars inside your vegetable, right? And so what happens when the Maillard reaction occurs is that through the process of heating it and through some enzymatic reactions,

all right, now imagine like your little brother comes into that room and just like destroys the Legos, right? Breaks them down into smaller pieces, maybe not all the way down into their individual building blocks, but breaks it down so that they are no longer these giant structures, right? And so now you and your little brother sit there and you reconstruct things, right? Except you're not following instructions anymore. You're just kind of like jamming things together.

And so you end up with a much broader set of smaller Lego pieces. Does that make sense? And that's essentially what's happening with the Maillard reaction. You're taking large proteins and carbohydrates, you're breaking them down into smaller bits, like snipping them up, and then you are recombining them in this sort of cascade of chemical reactions and creating hundreds of new flavor compounds. So where you might have had, you know, a dozen flavor compounds to begin with, you end up with hundreds of new ones, smaller molecules.

And generally the smaller molecules, you know, like simple sugars taste sweeter than complex carbohydrates. And so, and, you know, proteins get that sort of brown flavor to them. So generally smaller molecules, you're going to end up with a broader range, so like a more complex flavor, and you're also going to end up with a sweeter and more intense flavor when the Maillard reaction occurs. I always associate the Maillard reaction with browning too, like not just flavor transpiration.

So because the onions are going to get darker as you cook them. Is that also is that correctly the Maillard reaction? That is yes. The Maillard reaction is the browning reaction. Yeah, it's called the Maillard browning reaction. So when So when you brown your meat, when you toast a piece of bread, even when you let like an apple sit out and there's some kind of oxidation that occurs, like some part of that is Maillard-Browning as well. But yeah, it's generally, anytime you're browning a combination of proteins and carbohydrates with heat, that's the Maillard reaction. It's different but similar to just pure caramelization. You know, caramelization is something that you do with just straight sugar and that can be part of the Maillard reaction. It's different but similar to just pure caramelization.

Caramelization is something that you do with just straight sugar and that can be part of the Maillard reaction but it's not the entire story. So what's happening with onions when we caramelize them? We're cooking them slowly. For the amount of time we will discuss in a bit. It's a whole other segment. We're cooking them slowly. What's happening with the onions? Because you start with this thing that is crunchy, hard, raw, it makes my eyes tear. So when you're caramelizing onions,

so you're starting out, I mean, the first things that happen are you're heating them and you're, you know, when you heat things, you're sort of breaking down the pectin. And so all the, like the glue that holds the cells together is kind of disintegrating and you're also driving off moisture, right? And that's sort of, that's what the sweating step is, right? That early phase before any browning occurs,

you're pushing the moisture out of the cells and then you're basically evaporating that moisture off. And as that happens, you end up with a sort of more and more deeply concentrated solution of proteins and sugars that were dissolved and leaking out of those onion cells. And then after that, it's Maillard Browning, but the difficulty with onions and with caramelizing them

is that the temptation is to use higher heat than you should be, right? And what happens if you use higher heat is that instead of really evenly caramelizing all those sugars, you end up kind of burning the ones that are at the bottom of the pot, while some of the ones that are not at the bottom of the pot are still, you know, like the higher the heat you use, the more, the bigger the temperature gradient is going to be between the hottest parts of the onion and the coolest parts of the ones that are not at the bottom of the pot are still, you know, like the higher the heat you use, the more, the bigger the temperature gradient is going to be between the hottest parts of the onion

and the coolest parts of the onion. And so if you're not careful, what can happen is that you end up sort of burning some of those caramelized sugars and you end up with bitter caramelized onions as opposed to super sweet caramelized onions. That said, there's like, there's all kinds of tricks you can do for speeding up the process. I have a couple of tricks.

Yeah, what are yours? Well, tell me about your onion thermalization process, Deb. And I know that you don't think it takes the two to four hours that, like, Alton Brown would tell you it takes. I think that you can take the two to four hours that people on the internet tell you it can. But I think, and by the way, I had to look it up, because I remember this so clearly,

because I'm an old person on the internet. But in 2012, Tom Saka, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, I think I'm in Slate, he wrote this article called, Why Do Recipe Writers Lie and Lie and Lie About How Long It Takes to Caramelize. And he set off this whole conversation that we're still having 12 years later about why. Yeah, I mean, that's like a meme now, right? It's totally a meme now, but he's a hilarious writer, and he says it much more articulately.

But it basically was just this early viral rant about how recipe writers lie. We say it takes 20 minutes to caramelize onions. I'm telling you, though, I get it done in 40 minutes. But I do a couple things. Let me say, the base is 40 to 45 minutes for me. And I think that if you were eating them, you would think they were fantastic.

I'm not saying you can't go longer and get them even more complex, but I think that, cause I'm always like speaking, I mean, not that you aren't, but like I'm always thinking of like home cooks with real lives and real time constraints. Like let's talk about the point where it tastes really good,

even if it wouldn't make like some French chef in a toque happy. So, I just, cause I'm like, who's the boss here? Is it like, you know, who's trying to, you know, at what point does it taste to me like an amazing pot of caramelized onions? I can get there in 45 minutes. Yeah, well, you also have to remember that it's not a French chef dish. It's a, it's a peasant dish, right?

It's onions and stock. It's like, it's onions and stock And practicality should be the very first thing. Practicality and frugality should be the first things on your mind when you're talking about onion soup. And I feel like the only people we would have to explain this to are people who are raised in more of a chef as teachers way.

Everybody else already knows this, that you're just supposed to cook, like how you can get it done with what you have in a way that makes sense to you and tastes good. Like you're not, as I said, there's no chef teacher in the room with you. So what I do is I, and I actually think I first started doing this from the Julia Child onion soup recipe,

but you start with your onions, your butter, and- How are you slicing your onions, by the way? Are you using like a mandolin or a food processor? No, I use a knife, mostly because I'm probably more at risk using a mandolin. Although one time I used the food processor, I'm like, oh, this does a pretty solid job. Oh, yeah, the slicing blade on a food processor is great.

Yeah. So I actually slice them. Pole to pole? Or do you do them as rings? No, I don't do the pole thing. I do the crosswise. I want them to break down. I don't like when the onions stay intact.

No, I find that they break down more when you do them pole to pole. Really? When you do them crosswise, you end up with these kind of like, they look like segmented caterpillars at the end. No, they don't. I feel like they get much softer because it's almost like cutting a steak across the grain. Like, it tastes better. It dissolves better.

I feel like when I go pole to pole, wow, this is crazy. We are getting wild in the first hour of the Kenji and Tom show. So I feel like when you go pull to pull, they're just too intact at the end. Hmm. Okay. All right. I feel like it's like a steak cut with a grain. It's just not right.

Maybe it's also because I do it as thin as possible. Like I go on a mandolin or on a real thin, if I'm doing it by hand, I go really, really thin. And so I find that they do, yeah, they just kind of melt away when you cut them pull to pull. I don't know. I mean, it would be logical that they would go, do they go, I mean, is thinner going to cook faster? That's the logical answer. Thinner will cook faster. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thinner cooks faster with pretty much everything except potatoes.

Yes. Oh my gosh. We're going to have the Hasselback conversation another day. We already have that. Why does Hasselback take so long? Anyway, so the way I cook them is you start, there's so much liquid inside the onions. I started at a medium-low kind of heat, and I put the lid on for the first 15 to 20 minutes. I might stir it once or twice just because I have a gas stove

and the flame is going to be right in the middle and will probably want to scorch in some spots. But all of that liquid becomes steam. The onions soften and I feel like you shave a lot of time off and a lot of stirring time off and it's a really great technique. So at the end of the 15-20 minutes, they're limp. A lot of the water is, a lot of it's evaporated but even more will and you're at this good place.

Now you can start the stirring. Now we start that 20, for me, 20 to 30 minute period in which I can get them where I want them. I can take this, I usually start out slow. It's sort of like, you know, you're supposed to do everything slowly and carefully. So I start out slow. But as I get to the end of that 30 minute mark,

this is after the first 15 to 20 minutes under the lid, this is where I want you to start tasting it. And if you're getting impatient, pump up the heat a little bit. Are you listening for the sound here also? Like, do you notice that transition between when the onions are kind of like sweating and they're kind of, you know,

they're kind of like going like a... in their own liquid? Exactly. Till they turn to like... Like when you get the little, the actual frying noise. When you hear the sizzle, take off the lid and start stirring.

Now you have to keep moving them around. But I love that like there's, you don't have to stand over the stove for two hours stirring. It's not true. You can if you want. I mean, no, obviously, you know, if you want to avoid your family,

go in the kitchen and stir your onions. It is true that the longer and slower you take, the sweeter they're gonna get and the more complex the flavors are gonna get. But there's real diminishing returns on that, right? You can take like an extra two hours and make them like 2% sweeter and more complex, right? But you don't, yeah. Absolutely.

You always have to like factor in, what's my real goal here and how much is my audience gonna care? Exactly, and my audience is me. So I find that, again, not always, but it depends on the amount of onions and how much I'm doing. But often at the 45-minute mark, I have something that is golden brown, nicely caramelized.

And then I just have to decide how much more time I want to put into it. Do I want to keep it really slow and go another 15 or 30 minutes? Do I want to keep this going for that hour and a half people recommend? Or am I getting a little impatient, and I need to get dinner done? And am I going to crank up going for that hour and a half people recommend. Or am I getting a little impatient and I need to get dinner done and am I going to crank up the heat just a little bit to kind of pick up the color and the pace without burning

it, but just kind of move it along? Like, come on guys, we need to move it out the door. They're in this process. Are you doing any kind of deglazing? Are you adding any liquid or anything like that? I don't usually, but sometimes the onions get pretty dry and sticky, and I might add a splash of something. That's my trick, is that if I, you know, I find once you get to the point you're talking about, if you do pump up the heat a little bit,

the only thing you have to really be careful about is that you don't want to burn any of the sugars that are on the bottom. Like if you're using an enameled Dutch oven, you don't want to burn any of the sugars that are down there. And so, yeah, my trick is like once I start to see some amount of like, sugars sticking to the bottom of the pot, I just add a couple tablespoons of water and deglaze it. And what you find, what I find then, at least, is that you, when you deglaze it, you end up, you know, you make this kind of, like, sugary syrup that then coats all the onions

again and you can even out the color. And so I do a process where I kind of let it brown a little bit and then I deglaze it and I do that repeatedly, like, every couple, so that you really sort of regulate the heat and you make sure that nothing is burning, but you're picking up all that flavor from the bottom of the pot. So it's like a repeated deglazing process, is what I do. I also just realized, I said 45 minutes.

I was thinking of like three onions, four onions. The amount that I use for onion soup might push us closer to like 50 minutes, 55, because it's a larger volume. But I generally find that I can do a few onions without much trouble and with a really, really fantastic flavor. There's no bite left in them. They're sweet.

They're complex. The apartment smells amazing. So it's not, it's not cheating. So this is not to say that you can't keep it on the lowest, lowest flame and do it for an hour or two, if you wish. Go at it. I do agree with you on diminishing returns in that second hour. Have you, have you experimented at all with doing it in the oven?

I haven't. Have you done a recipe for that? I haven't, but you know, years ago when I was at Cooks Illustrated, this was probably in like 2006 or 2007. Becky Hayes did a recipe for onion soup there. I mean, in her recipe, you do them in the, you do them in the you do them in the oven if I remember right like you slice the onions you Mix them with butter I think you start them on the stovetop and then you put them in a low oven and they cook in the oven for about Three hours and you with the lid on in a Dutch oven. That's what I was gonna ask you if the lid is on

Yeah, yeah with the lid on in a Dutch oven You have to stir often you go in in there I think you go in there and stir probably like every 30 to 45 minutes or so and maybe add a little bit of liquid as it's going. But it's a process that actually works really well, especially like if you want to be real, like if you got a lot of time, but you don't want to do a lot of stirring, the process works really well. It's really good for caramelizing onions. Wait, Deb, did we talk about what kind of fat you're using and how much of it? So I usually, we did not talk about what kind of fat. I use three tablespoons of butter for three pounds of onions. Wow, a tablespoon per pound. Okay. I use a lot more butter than that.

I know. It's over. We're going to get there. I'll start with a stick, no matter how many onions I'm doing. Wow. That's probably why everyone likes your cooking. That sounds amazing. I'm not saying I don't ever add more, but in general I feel that that amount. I also, you can also do add another tablespoon of some sort of neutral oil and that'll help keep the butter from browning because sometimes it's your butter browning and not your onions. I feel very, like very strongly that it should be those brown or the brown skinned yellow onions. I don't like starting with sweet onions at all.

I'm trying to, I think you're gonna get the most flavor complexity from brown onions. Some people call them yellow onions. And I feel like when you start with the sweet onions, you don't get, it's not gonna have, it needs to start with more of a bite to get sweeter and more interesting. I haven't done these tests personally,

but you know, I've seen them done and I've participated in taste tests at Cooks Illustrated and at Serious Eats. In the tests I've seen done and I've tasted, what you find is that whether you're starting with a sweet onion or a yellow onion, the end result is actually not that sweet onions are sweeter. For say, they don't have more sugar than yellow onions do. It's just they have less of the other stuff that gives the onions bite. They have less flavor. Exactly.

It's not that a sweet onion is going to give you a sweeter onion soup. It's just going to give you a slightly less complex onion soup. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. So how long do you take to caramelize onions? If I was making what most people would think of as a French onion soup, I do it similarly to you, where I start with the lid on,

then I take the lid off, and then I caramelize it. If I'm really pushing it, I have this old video on YouTube where I caramelized an onion in like 12 minutes where I'm like basically doing it over high heat and just deglazing, deglazing, deglazing the whole time. And you can get a decently caramelized onion. It's not gonna be as complex as an onion that takes a long time to caramelize.

And sometimes also if I'm really pushing it, I might add a little bit of sugar at the beginning or I might even add like a tiny pinch of baking soda which helps the onions break down. It can also turn them a little bit yellowish. But generally, I do it the sort of the old fashioned way, the same way you do. It'll take me about an hour.

That said, the onion soup recipe I've been making most frequently for the last few years is Jacques Pepin's Liannay's onion soup. It's heartier than a typical French onion soup, but you also don't have to caramelize the onions for as long. So in that recipe, you're slicing your onions pretty thick and then you are browning them. And it only takes about 15 minutes on the stove top.

You're not completely caramelizing them. You're getting like some brown bits. You're getting some caramelized edges, but the onions are not really deeply darkly caramelized. So you start with that and then you add your stock. And then when you make it, you layer it with lots of bread and lots of cheese. So it's like, I take a thinly sliced baguette,

I toast it till it's completely dry. And then, you know, I'll put like a few, a few slices of that at the bottom, then a ladle of soup, then some, then some cheese, then some more baguette, some more soup, some more cheese. And so you're alternating, like, it's almost like you're building a lasagna, you know? I was like, is it like a French Ribolita? Like the, does the bread supposed to break down and become part of the thickness of the soup?

It does, yeah. So it ends up being more like a stew. And then at the very top, you know yeah, exactly. Does the bread supposed to break down and become part of the thickness of the soup? It does, yeah. So it ends up being more like a stew. And then at the very top, you know, you finish it with cheese and then you bake it for a real long time. It's like 45 minutes to an hour in the oven. And so during that process,

the onions gain some sweetness, everything kind of combines. And then in the real traditional recipe, he says you would puree the soup, like you would pass it through like a Tammy, so that it's really smooth before you add the bread. And then at the very end, you'd also, you make this mixture of port and egg yolks, and

then you like poke a hole in the center of the soup and pour that egg yolk and port mixture in and stir it around. I don't do that. Does it get an egg drop soup or does it just like texture or is it like thickening? It's thickening. Yeah. It's more that it's like it becomes even more of like a hearty stew and it's like real sloppy and messy

but delicious. But I never bother with the egg yolk thing. I do, no, it's not egg drop soup because it's really by the time it's done, it's really not broth anymore. It's like, you know, you eat it with a spoon in it or you could almost eat it with a fork. But the flavor, because you have that real long bake time, it gets a real nice sort of oniony sweetness to it

without the need to caramelize for an hour on the stovetop. So that's my sort of go-to recipe these days. I want to try it. I've never made onion soup like that before. Yeah, well, we'll leave a link for it. I am going to do this oven thing, because I love hands-off in the oven cooking. I mean, I don't care how long.

I work from home, so it's not a big deal to me if something's going in the oven all day while Well, that works for me. Hands off cooking. It's the stirring that kind of like breaks my brain. So I make risotto and polenta in the oven. No stir, just stirring it at the end. And so it feels like feels like caramelized onions should be have that potential to. But maybe when we come back from the break, we can talk about all of the other parts of onion soup that make it amazing.

Yes, we're going to talk about the broth and the bread and the cheese and all those other things. That'll be next on the recipe with Deb and Kenji. So let's talk about stock, Deb. What are you doing for stock in your onion soup? So for me, I feel strongly that the very best stock, assuming you eat meat, for onion soup is beef stock. And I don't think that you need, I don't feel that you need homemade stock for every soup.

I think there's a lot of soups, such as a pureed soup or a more complex soup where you don't necessarily get all the homemade stock qualities that you want, like you're not in the final bowl. So if you're just trying to figure out like, when like when I make homemade stock and maybe since I've pre-used it off, I get kind of precious about when to use it. I don't want to waste it on the wrong thing. Anyway, so, but I feel like for onion soup, a homemade beef stock is unbelievable. It takes something already amazing and raises it to a level that you just cannot believe

it came out of your kitchen. You will never, you will never feel this triumphant in the kitchen again. It's amazing. Well, cause I find, you know, a good homemade beef stock that has, that you're making with plenty, like bones that have like plenty of connective tissue. Maybe you're making it with like short ribs or something,

or like a beef shin or beef shank. It gets that real sort of sticky, you know, that like, that like it sticks to your lips. It gives it a lot of, it has like a lot of body to it. You know? It feels more filling. to your lips, it gives it a lot of, it has like a lot of body to it, you know? It feels more filling. It feels like heartier. Yeah.

Because otherwise it's just onions in flavored water, right? Like it's just, it's not necessarily gonna feel as much like a meal. Yeah, hot onion water. That's it. Mm. Is that how Elizabeth Davis described it?

What did you call it? I remember the very best onion soup I can remember having was, I was working at a restaurant in Boston and my chef, his name is Jason Bond, he made an onion soup out of veal stock and braised short ribs. So he braised a bunch of short ribs and then he took the stock from that, which was made with veal stock. So it was this real thick, glossy, almost like a, not quite like a demi-glace consistency, but it was like,

if you'd reduced it a little bit more, it would have been like a demi-glace. And that with the onions, a lot of thyme in there, and then just a little bit of sort of like the short rib scraps, you know, like the bits that were still stuck to the bone were in that soup also. And it was like memorably, this was like 20 years ago, and it's still like in my head what that felt like tasting,

what that felt like eating, you know? And the way it kind of coats the back of the spoon and everything about it is just real, real good. Do you usually use, if you're making it, if you want to go like go to 12 on it, would you make it with beef stock or do you use chicken stock? Generally I use chicken stock just because I have chicken stock far more frequently at home than I have beef stock. But yeah, if I'm going to go for it, I would do beef stock.

I have this recipe that I published in the New York Times a couple of years ago for these French onion lamb shanks. You make like an onion soup base and then you braise lamb shanks in it. And it gets a sort of similar real sort of rich, unctuous, sticky mouth feel to it. And then you also add barley and some greens to it so it turns into this kind of hearty meal.

But yeah, I think into this kind of hearty meal. But yeah, I think adding some kind of red meat that's been browned and you're getting that real red meat texture to the broth, I think, is good. If I am doing chicken broth, you can get a sort of similar texture if you make sure you just reduce it enough, so that it's really nice and rich. But yeah, I think if you're gonna go for it

and you really want the heartiest sort of best onion soup, then yeah, like a meat broth of some kind is gonna give that to you. When I make beef stock, I roast it. So I start with a tray of mixed beef bones, usually some shank, marrow, oxtail, just generally what I can get, but I have like a, I have a sort of ideal balance,

but I just kind of work with whatever butcher has. And then I will roast it for the better part of an hour at a pretty high temperature with the carrots and onions that I'm going to use for the stock. And then I use that to build it. And I feel like you get a really nice flavor from it. But I've also played around with doing this with chicken parts too. This isn't going to make like that golden chicken broth that you might want for your chicken noodle soup or a lot of simpler soups.

But I think I could see if you were doing it for an onion soup, it would allow you to have more depth to it. I wouldn't roast it as long, but you can use the dark meat bones and get a lot more flavor out of it. If you are going to use store-bought broth as well, I find that what I like to do is I use chicken broth from a carton, which generally tastes better than the beef broth from a carton, because it has more sort of real chicken in it.

Then, you know, there's more real chicken in chicken broth than there is beef in beef broth, which is generally like made from, you know, like hydrolyzed yeast, prosciene, and things like that. So I'll use chicken broth as the base, but then I'll also add like a little bit of the better than bouillon concentrated, the beef, roasted beef concentrate.

And I find that combination works pretty well. If you're not gonna make your homemade stock for onion soup, that works pretty well. I don't use any boxed stock. I only use better than bouillon when I'm using, when I'm not making my own. I just feel like the, to me, the ingredients are a lot closer to what I wanna have in my stock.

And I love the concentration, and I really feel like the flavor is so much better. But so if I wanna go to 10, or I wanna go to 12, I'll make the beef stock, and I think it just the flavor is so much better. But so if I want to go to 10 or I want to go to 12, I'll make the beef stock. And I think it just makes it so rich. But I also, I was going to mention that if you're vegetarian or you don't want to eat beef or chicken stock with it, a really nice vegetable stock for it

is one with mushrooms. Or if you could even make one with some dried mushrooms, like if you throw some porcini or dried shiitakes in there, you can get a lot more dynamic flavor. And I would definitely throw in some onions and onion skin for flavor too. And I think the mushroom onion flavor profile goes really nice to give you a hearty base. However, I was actually going to say that one of the better than bouillon vegetable bases is actually really dark.

It has a, like it's not this golden, boring, vegetable broth that you would expect. It's really hearty and I really like it when I'm using a vegetable, when I want a quick vegetable broth for heavier vegetables, like a real wintery one. It has a nice dark color too. So you also might be able to find it at the store.

Kenji, how do you feel about cheese on your soup? Because you know, the classic onion soup doesn't have to have cheese, but I think the way we think of onion soup is that if it doesn't have cheese, I would- Wait, wait, the classic onion soup doesn't have to have cheese, but I think the way we think of onion soup is that if it doesn't have cheese, I would. Wait, wait, the classic onion soup doesn't have to have cheese? Yeah, no, Julia Childs just has, you know, onion soup. And then it's like the second recipe.

And no bread? With gratiné. No, that's an extra thing. It's an extra thing. I think the merger of this, when at least I was reading up on the, exactly. I least I was reading up on the, exactly. I think I was reading the modern version of French onion soup dates from the mid 19th centuries

and Les Halles, that open air market in Paris, and basically the restaurants around the market served the soup with a substantial topping of grated cheese and put it under a grill. So nowadays that's how we think of it, but I think before then, it wasn't standard. I am team cheese all the way. I mean, like I said, I told you, I do the Jacques Pepin

Lyonnais recipe where you're layering the bread and cheese starting from the bottom of the bowl all the way to the top. And then I like a good coating of cheese at the top. Yeah, I want my onion soup to be something that's kind of stringy and stretchy. There is some classic onion soup experience. One, you're going to burn your mouth on it because you're not going to have a sense of stringy and stretchy. There are some classic onion soup experiences. One, you're going to burn your mouth on it

because you're not going to have a sense of how hot it is. Like, even as cooks, we know it came out of an oven. Like, that's where the broiling happens. But I don't believe it. And that it's going to trap so much heat between this, like, heavy soup crock and the cheese on top. It's going to trap so much. I burn my mouth every single time.

I also feel that you're not really eating French onion soup in this pivotsens, the bread, unless you have a... Unless you're sitting there with your spoon trying to cut a bite of a very thick crusted bread inside the bowl. You know how like the bread always has like some... Probably because it's stale or it's either baguette or maybe it's some sort of sourdough, like a really crusty bread.

And the bread crust, you can cut into the center with the spoon, but the crust you're like, you're trying to- Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you lift it up and then there's still like a bit, like half of a crust hanging down off the end of your spoon that you're trying to get off against the side of the crock. I feel like I'm always trying to use the spoon as a knife

to cut a bite out of the crust. Anyway, it's a mess. It splashes everywhere. I wouldn't have it any other way. Onion soup is one of those soups that is meant to sort of, you need a separate plate underneath the bowl because it's gonna get messy. It's gonna get messy. I am messy.

Can you get it out of my clothes? We can discuss it at the end of the episode. So let's, Deb, I mentioned briefly, you know, that my French onion lamb stew, but in general I find French onion soup just to be a real sort of compelling set of flavors. What are some other things that you have done with those flavors? Well, I mean, I don't know if you've heard of this website called Smitten Kitchen, but I have a recipe on there. Sorry, I always have to do that.

I have a recipe on there for short rib onion soup that's a bit like that one you described. It is so decadent and rich. And you start by braising your short ribs in the oven. We use the broth that comes out of that braising liquid as the broth for your, so you're basically braising your short ribs, caramelizing your onion, and then you use the broth that forms

from braising the short ribs as your soup broth. And the decadence and luxury and richness of this is unparalleled. It's so nice. And we've actually made this a bunch of times. By the way, Kenji, I think I mentioned this here over text, but I've actually made your lamb shank stew, but I made it with chicken. You said with chicken. Yeah, I know.

It's kind of weird, but I really want to... I haven't published the recipe yet. I was supposed to. You guys should like nag me to publish it. But I did a chicken stew in a similar style with some of the caramelized onions, greens, and barley. And it was so nice. We brought it to my sister-in-law after she had a baby

and it was just like such a nice cozy meal for us to all tuck into and fuss over the little baby. I've also done one more like slightly less traditional is a French onion baked lentils and farro. And that's also on Smitten Kitchen. It feels fancy but it's really hearty. You're eating lentils, you're eating farro, you're eating like good nutritious stuff in a really decadent way and it has a it ends up having a risotto like consistency but the flavors are spot on for onion soup. So you should make that. Do you do cheese or anything like that at the end or is it just? Absolutely,

absolutely. It's got the broiled cheese. It doesn't do cheese or anything like that at the end? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's got the broiled cheese. It doesn't have the bread layer. It is the broiled cheese. But I keep it kind of up. So it's like lentils in the place of bread, basically. Lentils in a fair place of bread. That sounds delicious.

So you're going to caramelize the onions. You add the lentils, the flour, you bake it in the oven. In a braiser that I mentioned before. It fits really well in there. The kitchen style braiser. I feel like I'm being terrible about it, but I use it all the time. Anyway, I use my braiser. You can use an equivalent size pot and you bake it in the oven and then at the very end

you throw all that cheese on and you broil the top and it is just, it's such a nice vegetarian made. It's like, it's special. It feels festive. It's decadent, but it's also nutritious, which I feel like sometimes gets lost in vegetarian means. Would you ever put some greens in there? I've thought about it, but I feel like it's just going to muddle the flavor, because it really very clearly

tastes like an onion soup, and I would much rather have a big green salad on the side. OK, all right. That's cool. Or a side of greens. I feel like I'd rather let the greens be greens and the lentil, the soup be soup. Got it.

How about you? What have you done with onion soup outside the traditional onion soup realm? Well, yeah, I think it's great as a base for braising, virtually anything. No, there's this great recipe on serious eats from Sasha Marks, it's a French onion tart tatin. And so essentially like, yeah, you're caramelizing onions and then you layer a bunch of like sliced onions

in the bottom of a cast iron skillet, and you brown them and then you put puff pastry on top and you bake it all and then you kind of turn it over onions in the bottom of a cast iron skillet, and you brown them, and then you put puff pastry on top, and you bake it all, and then you kind of turn it over. And there's cheese on there, and so the onions kind of, you know, in a similar way that an apple tart titan, that top layer of puff pastry gets soaked in the sweet caramelized juices, and then you turn it all over,

and it's kind of a messy, like a fork and knife tart type thing. Is the cheese underneath the onion? That's how I make it. Actually, I don't remember how it is in the actual recipe. For sure, the onions are directly against the bottom of the cast iron pan,

because you get them kind of caramelized. Yeah, I don't remember how they do the cheese. But when I make it, I put the cheese on top of the onions and then put the crust on top of that, and then bake it and then turn it all over. I would definitely eat that. Yeah. Yeah.

I also do, I like having like caramelized onions in Gruyere as the base for a pizza also. I think it comes out real good on pizza. And you can also do like, you know, if you have like braised short ribs or some kind of shredded meat situation, that also goes great on a, like, yeah, like a French onion pizza with braised beef,

I think is real, is real excellent. I feel like I've seen a lot of recipes for French onion grilled cheese, but I think I would prefer mine less sweet and a little more savory, but like, don't get me wrong. is real excellent. I feel like I've seen a lot of recipes for French onion grilled cheese, but I think I would prefer mine less sweet and a little more savory. But like, don't get me wrong, I would eat it. Oh, I also, I have a French onion tart,

more of a slightly quiche, but like very little egg, just enough to bind it in my first cookbook. It's a French onion, and I hope it's my first cookbook. It's not nearly as pretty as this tart to tan though that you just mentioned. So maybe we can just step it up a little bit. So you, by the way, mentioned that you like a lot of cheese on your soup.

And I actually feel like restaurants often put too much cheese on. Like I needed to have some cheese. I want it to have the crusty bits on the outside, but I don't want it to be like 50% cheese. I don't want like a big, I don't want fondue on top. I want it to be 50% cheese, but I don't want it to be like 50% cheese. I don't want like a big, I don't want fondue on top. I want it to be 50% cheese, but I don't want it all on top. I want it like thoroughly mixed in throughout and layered.

I like it both ways. I like having it brothier. I like having it with bread in there. Like I like it in all forms, whether it's stewy or soupy. It's all good to me. One thing also with onion soup is that, I feel like very often, it's more often over-salted and sometimes under-salted,

but I feel like the seasoning is so important. When you have so few ingredients, the little things, I mean, seasoning is always a big thing, but getting the salt and like the seasoning level exactly right is so important because when it's too salty, it's just unpleasant to eat and you kind of feel yucky afterwards. When it's under season, you can't fix it. You can't go underneath the cheese and salt it from a salt shaker. Like you won't get it right. So I really feel like it's

a good taste as you go and get it exactly right because kind of really good onion soup, probably unsurprisingly at Balthazar, but I think not everyone expects it to still be amazing, like 30 years later, but we had a perfect onion soup a few weeks ago there. And I was like, the seasoning is perfect. It's not too salty, it's not under salted. And I felt like nailing that really, I mean, it just wraps up the whole dish.

Properly seasoning is always important, but yes, it is definitely real important in simple soups like this. And especially ones that are layered and baked and you can't adjust anything when you're done with it. Exactly, your casserole of an onion soup, which I definitely want to eat. I will say, by the way,

if you look at the classic onion soup recipes, like the Julia Child's onion soup from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, it's like, go put, it's like take your cheese crouton and put a teaspoon of cheese on each one. It's shockingly, you would not be happy. It's shockingly less cheese than you would ever expect. Well, did ovens always have broilers? I mean, was she making this for more of a, I don't know. I mean, it was definitely a little bit easier. And I used that when I had an oven that didn't have a broiler, that technique of doing just cheesy toast,

and then you sink them on before serving. Oh, but you don't need a broiler. I mean, I don't broil my onion soup. I typically put everything on a tray and bake it in a hot oven. Like I don't even use the broiler. I just put it in the oven and bake it. For my short rib onion soup, I do a tray or two of the cheesy soup croutons, like the sliced bread with the cheese baked on it.

And we sink those into it at the end. But that's because I want the short ribs and the onions to kind of like, I don't feel like it needs the full cheese lid because it's so decadent with the ribs and the onions anyway. So you can add one, you can add two, but we just kind of sink it in at the end. Yeah.

Yeah. Can you waffle French onion soup? Oh, geez. No, but I think French onion anything is a compelling recipe title. So if you or I come up with a recipe for French onion waffles, I'm sure it would be a viral sensation. I'll let you take that one.

Can you taco a French onion soup or the flavors of French onion soup? Definitely. But for sure. Yeah, yeah. If you got some braised meat or you do some mushrooms or whatever, like vegetable, whatever it is. But yeah, with French onion flavors and some Gruyere in a tortilla,

I think that would be delicious. Absolutely, you can taco French onion. I think you can quesadilla French onions soup even better. Oh God, that would be so good. How about, does it leftover? Yes, soup is made for leftovers. But I would, that's another argument for me of keeping the cheese off to the end.

Like I would do it, I'd want to reheat the soup and then do the cheesy finish. I wouldn't want to have day old cheesy finish that I'm like chiseling through. Or day old soggy bread. No, or you'd have to make, you'd have to add fresh cheese and re-broil the whole thing, re-bake the whole thing. We're gonna, I'm gonna need a fresh cheese lid with each batch of leftovers.

Can you cook it in a pan with butter? I mean, you kind of already did. That's sort of how we got here, especially when we use a full stick of butter as per Kenji's recipe. Can you get it out of kids clothes? And by kids clothes, we mean Deb's clothes because I've already told you,

I make a huge mess of myself when I eat this soup. Or out of the folds of a charpé. That's it for today's episode, but we want to hear from you. Is there another recipe or food you want us to chat about? Any comments or questions about this week's dish? Tell us at TheRecipePodcast.com or at Kenji and Deb, or call us and leave us a message at 202-709-7607.

The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich, and Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations. Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. The recipe was created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Kenji Lopez-Alt. Thanks for listening.