French Onion Soup with a Bread Lid
Forty minutes of real onion browning, then a toasted round of bread and a cap of Gruyere under the broiler. Toast the bread hard or it sinks.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 60 min
- Total
- 75 min
- Serves
- 4
Ingredients
Four crocks.
- ThinSlim 4 slices ThinSlim Foods Zero Net Carb Bread Sourdough
- 3 lb yellow onions, halved and sliced thin
- 4 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 2 sprigs fresh thyme
- 1/2 cup dry white wine
- 6 cups beef stock
- 1 tsp sherry vinegar
- 8 oz Gruyere, shredded
- Black pepper
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Made with ThinSlim. Figures are the product label, not the finished dish.
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Method
- Melt the butter with the oil in a heavy pot over medium heat. Add the onions and the salt and cook 40 to 45 minutes, stirring every few minutes, until they collapse to a deep even brown and smell sweet. Lower the heat if they catch at the edges.
- Add the thyme and the wine and scrape the bottom of the pot clean as it bubbles down, about 3 minutes.
- Pour in the stock, bring to a simmer and cook 20 minutes uncovered. Fish out the thyme, stir in the vinegar and season with pepper.
- While it simmers, toast the bread slices until they are dark golden and rigid, then let them cool on a rack. They should feel dry and stiff, not springy.
- Heat the broiler. Ladle the soup into four oven safe crocks, leaving half an inch at the top.
- Float a toasted slice on each, trimming it to fit the crock, and heap the Gruyere over the bread and right up to the rim.
- Broil 2 to 4 minutes, watching, until the cheese melts and browns in patches. Serve hot, with a warning that the crocks are hot.
Tips
Toast to rigid and cool on a rack. This bread is soft and absorbent, so a warm or under-toasted slice disappears into the broth within a minute. Toasted hard and cooled, it holds long enough to eat.
Seal the edges with cheese. Cheese taken right to the rim of the crock holds the bread up and keeps the broth off it. A bare rim lets soup wick in from the side.
The onions are the recipe. Forty minutes is not a suggestion and there is no shortcut that tastes the same. Start them before anything else.
Soup keeps five days and freezes three months. Toast fresh bread each time, it does not keep once it has been under cheese.
Seal the edges with cheese. Cheese taken right to the rim of the crock holds the bread up and keeps the broth off it. A bare rim lets soup wick in from the side.
The onions are the recipe. Forty minutes is not a suggestion and there is no shortcut that tastes the same. Start them before anything else.
Soup keeps five days and freezes three months. Toast fresh bread each time, it does not keep once it has been under cheese.