The French Onion Soup Project is now in day 2.

Roasting the bones made a huge difference before starting broth. So did adding fresh rosemary, chives, chervil, Herbes de Provence and 3 kinds of onions (Vidalia, red, plain old cooking onions.)

The recipe just popped out of my head as I tried to pay homage to the soup my childhood friend Karen’s mom used to make. And oh, my her soup was so amazing that none of us ever forgot it ….only none of us got the recipe either!

This started a day ago when I roasted eight big marrow bones at 425° for like 20 minutes. Then I reduced the heat to 375° and roasted approximately another 15 minutes.

Then I turned the oven off and ignored them for a little while well I got the big stockpot ready – handful of bay leaves, salt, a bunch of carrots cut into chunks a few ribs of celery, the juice I had taken out of the pan and frozen from the Christmas roast, two large yellow cooking onions chunked. Then I added my roasted bones and filled the pot to within an inch and a half from the top.

After bringing everything to a boil, I reduced to a low simmer and let the soup cook away for about two and a half hours.

I let the stock cool to room temperature and put the lid back on and put into the fridge overnight.

This morning I got the stockpot out of the refrigerator, pulled the fat off the top and discarded and then
cooked the bones in the now broth for another three hours on low.

I let that all cool so I could remove the bones, broth making veggies, and any other fat that I could get out from the pot and then added all the onions (I think ten or eleven onions total all sliced as uniformly as I could manage), and added the herbs and amended the other seasonings, added fresh ground pepper, added a couple dashes of Worchestershire sauce , a cup and a half of wine, an 10 ounce pack of fresh mushrooms sliced very thin (don’t use presliced mushrooms they don’t taste as fresh), and a little balsamic vinegar. And one small dash of soy sauce.

The soup will sit one more overnight in the fridge after cooling and will be served with either Swiss or Gruyere cheese tomorrow.

I have been doing this two to three day cooking the soup thing and it has led to much tastier soups. Also when you’re working with meat and poultry it means you have more than one opportunity to get as much fat as possible off the soup as there is nothing worse than greasy soup.

So while some like doing soups in crockpots including French Onion, I still think nothing beats making soup old school.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bon appetit!