French Onion Soup Experience

I watched a video of Alton Brown making French Onion Soup and for some reason – maybe because I love onions now – I just couldn’t wait to make the soup. This felt like a huge thing, like a project I was really into. The intensity of the urge to make it was a lot greater than my usual excitement about finding a new recipe.

Getting the ingredients was really fun. I just discovered a Farmer’s Market in town, and couldn’t wait to go. When I did, they had many great looking onions for cheaper than at Wal-Mart. It was really fun buying something from a group of people rather than from the store. It was just different, and therefore exciting. It was a group of Mexicans who didn’t speak English well, but were polite. I bought about 8 onions and some cherry tomatoes.

Joel & I decided to have me make the soup on Friday for dinner, which is his day off. I had all the ingredients earlier in the week, and we both really looked forward to the weekend. Joel had watched the video too, so he was excited about the soup as well.

Here are some of the onions, don’t they look great!!

This was me trying to get all the ingredients together. But notice that I got apple cider vinegar – well I didn’t realize until I was setting out the ingredients that I needed apple cider, not vinegar. So Joel went to the store to grab it while I began the process of chopping the onions.

Just as I began to peel the onion’s top layer and prepare them for cutting, I noticed that a few of the onions I had bought weren’t looking so great. I lost about 2 and a half onions. I was unhappy about that because Alton had said on his cooking video not to skimp on the onions. So I went to call Joel, who was at the store, but I hear the cell phone ringing at home! I try to always have him take it if he goes out without me, but he doesn’t like to and easily forgets to grab it on the way out. Its just because he isn’t used to having a cell phone, and since it was mine before we got married, we mostly treat it as mine. But I realized that I had some extra white onions in the fridge, so I was able to make up for it. And by the time I was finished putting all the onions in a bowl, I realized that I had more than enough onions! So when Joel returned, I didn’t even mention it.

As soon as Joel walked in the door, all he could smell was onions! I was chopping away, and it wasn’t going so bad. He took a picture of me cutting the onions.

Not long later, though, it all the sudden heavily kicked in, and I was leaking tears all down my face. It was so painful!!! His eyes were burning just coming into the kitchen to take a picture of me. See all the tears?

I finally got all the onions cut and into the bowl. My bowl almost wasn’t big enough for the onions! Notice that the lid is closed on the onions. That was a big mistake! The onions were supposed to be left on high for about an hour until they reduce down tremendously. So after 2 hours of them not looking reduced enough and totally watery, I consulted the video. I noticed that he never put a lid on it, which makes sense since the lid would be keeping in all the water that I am trying to burn out in order for the onions to caramelize!

Now dinner is 2 hours later, which is bad because we had a big lunch and so had planned on a late dinner. Then another hour goes by and the onions still look like they were. That’s when I got out a candy thermometer that aunt Donna gave me and checked the temperature. It wasn’t even 150 degrees, and I was supposed to have it around 350!

I turned up the heat and it finally began to show some signs of movement! Joel is beginning to get tired and realizing that we can’t have this dinner tonight. I am still hopeful and try to get him to occupy himself with something for a while. But by the time I finished the soup, Joel had gone to sleep. The soup was officially done at 1AM! I didn’t even feel like eating it either. So I let it cool a little and put it in the fridge.

Honestly, the onion smell was so strong the whole time. It was definitely onion overload. I told Joel as I got in bed that I didn’t even eat it yet because I had already breathed it and soaked it and absorbed it completely! It was in my system. I know the pores on my face soaked up onions, my eyes were filled with the juice and poured out onion tears. And my nose kept the onion smell with me even when I went outside. I think I found my onion limit! It is really kind of a painful thing to cut and cook that many onions!

So here is the final product! We ate it for lunch the next day. I made some really yummy mozzarella bread to go along with it.

The bread had butter, shredded Parmesan cheese and mozzarella cheese. I used a French bread from Wal-Mart and I broiled it for about a minute. We love this cheese bread now, and cook it often!

The soup itself was a disappointment to us as well. It was ok, but I am still trying to figure out why I don’t like the taste. We think maybe it was the white wine and the beef consume. I don’t like the taste of wine, and Alton had mentioned in his show that you shouldn’t use a wine you don’t like the taste of. I also don’t care much for the taste of beef, and prefer chicken broth instead. I am hoping these changes would make the soup taste better to me, because I liked the onions and the cheese bread and if the soup itself would have tasted different, I might have liked it. So I am willing, even after all this difficulty, to give it a try with different ingredients.

Next time, I will make one to two servings, rather than enough for us to eat for a week! Also, since I know to cook it hotter, it wont take as long next time. I don’t want to believe at this point that I don’t love a soup full of onions. I love onions so much right now that I want to try again at making an onion soup! I will let you know when I give Melissa’s Onion Soup a try!