Fantastic French Onion Soup

Here's how to have fun making a huge pile of onions turn into half the size...it's destructive and creative at the same time! How cool is that?!  Not only that, but this soup tastes wonderful! Please be gentle with me, this is my first instructable.

I made a large batch of soup and froze it so that I could have beefy heaven with little notice. The soup really freezes well. I put about 1 cup of soup in a quart freezer bag. When you want to eat it, simply take it out of the freezer, knock in on the counter a few times to break it in half so that it comes out of the bag easy or just cut the bag off. I prefer to heat it in two steps to make sure the soup is nice and hot. Add a little bit of water to the pot to keep the soup from boiling off while the pan is heating up. Once the soup is nice and warm, pour it into the terrine, cut a bread round and cover it with a nice slice of Havarti Cheese. Put it under the broiler for about 5 min. and you're soup bound!

Step 1 Broth Balancing

So I've had this hankerin' for beef lately. I was out of beef stock, because I'd only made half my usual batch. This meant I couldn't make any soup. :( But my beef craving came to the rescue because I made a pot roast with lots of lovely liquid to cover it and decided that would make some wonderful French Onion Soup! I ended up with a lot of broth - 2 gal of it! So I had to get a lot of onions. That's a pic of about 12 Lb of large yellow onions all sliced up with minimal tear-streaks.

Officially, this soup is made with beef consomme. That's beef stock that's been really concentrated by causing a lot of water to evaporate off, then its strained so that its very clear. It tends to be very beefy and tends toward salty. But this soup is actually a lot more forgiving than people give it credit. The key is just to get some liquid that tastes really beefy. You could get store-bought beef broth, use the pot roast liquid like I did, or combine beef bullion with some oyster sauce (but watch out for saltiness because you're going to add salt to the onions as well). Honestly, if you're not really that into the salty beef taste, you could make this vegan with water and the juice that runs off the onions (what the heck, add some mushroom sauce for good measure). And you'll be surprised at how much juice those onions give off!

I've not given any hard ingredients because this soup is all about ratios. The ingredients are simply liquid, salt, and onions...wtih bread and cheese for garnish. I also don't talk about seasoning. The pot roast liquid I used had already been seasoned. If you want to dress up your liquid, I'd recommend, bay leaf, a bit of garlic, thyme, sage, pepper. Just think about the beefiest thing you've ever eaten, and season to get that flavor. ;) For simplicity sake, think of a large onion as about a Lb. I used large yellow onions because I wanted them to have a little body with their sweetness, but this would taste great with some sweet Vadalias, or if you want something really mild, you could use large white butcher onions. Use about 1 1/2 Lg onions to a quart of liquid. A good ration would be 6 lg. onions to 1 gal. liquid to 1 1/2 tsp.. salt, adding salt to taste at the end.