French Onion Soup

Hey everyone!

I was mega nervous about putting this recipe online because when you think of the term onion soup, you think of this fabulous like french broth that’s clean looking and divine, I actually think most of the time they’re actually like sugary broths and do not taste like onions, so I have a recipe from one of my nans old cookbooks which I kid you not, will fix any type of cold or flu, it’s packed full of all this amazing flavour and totally decongests you. Is that the most tempting thing? Probably not but it’s really yummy so I couldn’t resist adding this muddy family fav to the list.

Ingredients 

• White Onions

• Green Onions

• Garlic

• Shallots

• Balsamic Vinegar

• Apple Cider Vinegar

• Rosemary

• Thyme

• Cornflour

• Salt

• Stock ( Home Made with Celery, Leeks, Carrots, Fennel, Ginger)

So basically the idea with this soup is the old have chicken soup when you’re sick, but I’ve never had chicken soup and I don’t understand how chicken can possibly clear your sinuses. Personally I think it’s a silly old wives tale and actually the benefits of having soup when you’re ill are the benefits of the botanicals, the most effective being garlic, ginger, and onions.

Green and white onions, in particular, are packed full of recovery factors and this isn’t designed to be a healthy recipe, but it does the job. So let’s start off with cooking the onions, now I had about three white onions and one green, I added one clove of garlic which was consumed by the onion flavor but if you wanted to sup it up you could definitely add more. I actually kept the onions pretty dry in the pan with a splash of vegetable oil as just a light fry until they began to go transparent and soften.

I wanted to add a quick bread recipe with this as a garnish to the final photo, so I’ve got loads of easy bread on here already. You just want to mix yeasts, self-raising flour, salt, a dash of sugar and leave to rise. You can go as wild as you want with ingredients but this was the garnish as opposed to the core of this recipe.

Next on the list is to add about two tbsp of balsamic vinegar, good quality is important for this as the flavours will add to the overall soup flavour. I also added apple cider vinegar at this point but you can add it later if you wanna keep more of the benefits when you’re poorly. Cook-off until the vinegar is reduced and start to add some rosemary and thyme, again you could add cayenne pepper for those thermogenic properties that kick out a cold but it’s up to you.

So the next part is the key to this, you need to add a broth to the mixture, I had some homemade stock from previous recipes with carrot, fennel, ginger and leek which added to the health benefits. I heated this up and then threw it into the pan, as long as it’s fresh you could use anything of your choice. There’s a lot of salt in the traditional stocks you buy premade so be aware of what you’re doing this for, health or otherwise. I added about 500ml of this to the pan, brought to the boil, turned down to simmer and added a lid for about 35 minutes. It takes a lot for the onions to completely break down and this is the part where it’s gonna be up to you how you wanna do, because the reason this looks thicker than you’d expect is that for me, what I like to do to jam pack this is seperate what’s left in the pan.

I drain the liquid and set it aside. Then the solids that are left in the pan I then blend into a paste, so you get a puree on one side, that’s the part with all the mad flavour that they always wanna reduce in these smoother classical french recipes and to be honest, it’s the part with all the goodness you need to kick your ass back into shape when you’re poorly. So I blended it to smooth, then combined it back with the liquid and cooked again for another ten minutes.

So once you have some bread of your choice, you can add some liquid and some vegan cheese like I’ve done or you can skip this step. Definitely up to you but is lovely to have with it. Now the final is not the prettiest soup, it tastes amazing I promise and it really helps.

Let me know if you’d try this when you’re under the weather!