Switch Up Your French Onion Soup Game. No Glass, Thanks.

The new French onion soup is neither French, nor onion, nor a soup. Go! Good thing I just take pitches and not dish them out, right? I wrote about French onion soup a while back, recounting a story that involved my friend and me smashing a bottle of wine against the side of her parents' house, catching the wine in a large stockpot and straining out the glass shards with a (clean) dish towel to make French onion soup. Then we were too scared to eat it.

But shenanigans aside, it's cold out there, friends. Not clam chowder cold, but brisk nonetheless. And I'm deep into a phase of refusing to take dishes at face value (awesome example here) so even though I love Gruyère with all my heart, I'm going to switch it up. The formula is basically the same: caramelize onions in plentiful butter until they can't be caramelized any further, add good beef stock and white wine, then some kind of toasted bread, then some kind of cheese. Deep breath:

  • Broil shredded Swiss or Jarlsburg onto a thick slice of rye, top with a piece of pastrami.
  • Glutard? Make croutons out of crazy cheese bread. Then top with more cheese. Suddenly it's not so bad to be glutarded.
  • Don't be mad: transfer the Cheez-it mac and cheese theory to French onion soup. Also please don't tell the French.
  • If you run a restaurant, try it with mozzarella and see if your diners notice it's not Gruyère.
  • Blow things way out of proportion: make a caramelized onion grilled cheese, float the devil on top, cover it with EVEN MORE CHEESE and broil the damn thing clean out of existence.

So warm up properly with either a cool twist or a monster take on a wonderful cold weather dish, and if you break two corkscrews in succession, maybe that's the wine gods suggesting you've had enough.

More soup for lunch on Food Republic: