For a few years now, Michael and I have served onion soup for Thanksgiving, and it's become something of a tradition. Because we only do this once a year, we like to make this an all-out, super-involved, multi-day cooking affair, using the most traditional ingredients and techniques. In this case, that means caramelizing twenty pounds of onions over the course of about eight hours. Why? Because we can. Also, because it tastes better. Sure, you could speed up the process a bit or cheat it with some sugar, and that's probably totally adequate for an everyday cooking project. But this ain't no everyday cooking project. This is Thanksgiving.
The recipe, if you can even call it that, is incredibly simple. Caramelize onions over very low heat for a very long time. Add water. The end.
Actually, there's a little more to it than that --- although that would yield a perfectly lovely soup, since 90% of the flavor comes from the onions anyway. But we usually toss in a few more ingredients to deepen the flavor. After the onions are done caramelizing, we add water until we reach the right consistency. Then we simmer the soup with a sachet of bay leaves, thyme sprigs and peppercorns, and add a splash of cognac.
One of the great things about onion soup (and there are many) is that it tastes better with age. As it sits for a day or two, the flavors deepen and meld together. Our plan is to finish caramelizing and make the soup today, let it sit tomorrow, and then portion it out on Thursday into individual ramikins and broil the tops with baguette croutons and Gruyère cheese. Does life get better than that?
Well, no, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First, there's the key step of caramelizing all of the onions. For those of you who don't do this sort of thing on a regular basis, here's what twenty pounds of onions looks like:
Before the caramelizing, of course, there's the key step of skinning and chopping all the onions. I think we did this on a mandoline one year, but we've since graduated to the food processor. Michael took care of trimming and quartering the onions, using proper finger-tucked cutting technique, of course:
I was in charge of feeding the onion quarters into the Cuisinart. We had two big pots with a chunk of butter melting in the bottom of each, ready to receive the bounty:
After many, many pulses of the food processor and not a few onion-inspired tears, everything was chopped up and piled into the two pots. Actually, not everything fit in both pots, so there was an overflow bowl on the side that we used to top up the pots once the onions started to shrink.
This basically goes against all my intuitions as a chef --- you should never crowd a cooking vessel with more food than it can handle, since then the stuff on the bottom burns while the stuff on the top stays raw. But in this case, since we intended to cook everything at a very low temperature for a very long time, it's not a big deal. It just needs to be stirred about every twenty minutes or so to keep everything cooking as evenly as possible.
What that means is that we have to stick pretty close to the kitchen all day, keeping an eye on the onions so that they don't start to catch on the bottom. But other than that, they don't need much attention, so we can do other cooking projects in the meantime --- like roasting two pans of beets...
...and making the baguettes that will eventually become croutons that will eventually go on top of the soup when it's broiled.
We don't want to cook all the time, though, especially since it's only Tuesday and we've still got two full days ahead of us. The best way to pass the time during onion soup making is by watching TV shows on DVD. The twenty-minutes-between-stirs schedule fits in almost perfectly with the commercial breaks. So we watch a bit, wait for a break, get up to check on the onions, watch a bit more, and repeat for several hours. The first year we did this, we blazed through the entire first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation; this year we're on the fourth season of The Wire.
Here are some pictures of our progress. If I had fancier photographic equipment, I'd set it up as a time-lapse. For now, though, it's just stills.
Onion cooking commences, circa 1:00.
After two hours:
After four hours (at this point, Michael said, "I think the lachrymators have denatured by now." How can you not love this guy?):
After six hours:
Mid-evening report: We've still got two pots going, but the onions have cooked down to about a quarter of what they were when we started. They're still quite wet, though, so the plan is to keep them going in two separate pots until they start to dry out a bit more. Then we'll combine them and keep a closer watch until they coast to full caramelization. If all goes well, we'll have soup by midnight. Stay tuned for updates.
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