Oven Onions

Caramelized onions are one of the highest forms the noble lily can take, but are generally so tedious we skip recipes that use them. America's Test Kitchen introduced me to a method that, while not trimming any time off the preparation, does spare me the constant stirring. Not unimportantly, the resulting caramelized onions are dark and fully developed, which is something I never have the patience or stamina to pull off on the stovetop. Needless to say, these are spectacular for such things as French onion soup.

6 onions, peeled, sliced into halves, then thinly sliced into half-rounds
3 tbsp butter
some salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the butter into 1 tbsp hunks, put in bottom of largish dutch oven.

Sprinkle the onions over the butter, making sure the half-rounds separate from each other. You can do this by "crumbling" the sliced onions in your fist, as if you were crunching saltines into chowder. Midway through adding the onions, sprinkle them with some kosher salt.

Lid the vessel and put in oven for 1 hour.

Using oven mitts, remove vessel from oven, unlid and stir the onions. They should be very moist but still largely uncolored. Make sure to scrape onions bits off the side of the pot, because they will burn there.

Put vessel back in oven, but with the lid slightly ajar. Cook for another hour.

Using oven mitts, remove vessel from oven, unlid and stir. The onions should be medium brown by now, sort of khaki colored. Put vessel back in oven without any lid, cook for 30-45 minutes. When this step is completed, the onions should be dark brown.

These are caramelized onions in my book, but let's take this just a step further for one of our favorite soups, since we're pretty much there.

For french onion soup, you would stir these onions until they are dark brown or chocolate colored. If they start crusting on the bottom of the pot, add some wine- champagne, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, or Gewürztraminer work well here- and stir until the crust dissolves in the wine. Keep this up until you have something that looks like thick, dark, chunky porridge. About ten minutes.

You'll want to use at least a cup of wine in this process, or as much as 2 cups, depending on how much you like sweet/tart and what the flavor balance of your wine is. All wines will add sweetness and acidity to the final soup, but the combination will be different with the wine, and some wines will bring unique flavors (champagne adds savory in the form of yeast, for example) so taste as you go.

Now that you have your thick onion porridge, add 6 cups mixed broths of your choice. Half and half beef and chicken is traditional. I love it with beef and lamb, but it's not so often I have lamb broth available. With the onions as dark as they are, a good vegetable broth can also work here if you are serving vegetarians.

Stir the broths into the onions, add a couple of sprigs of thyme, maybe a rosemary sprig, and let simmer for 30 minutes. Stir, remove herbage twigs, and eat.

Since I can hear you hollering for the cheese from here, okay, okay, okay, we'll do the cheese thing.

Preheat your broiler and position the rack so the top of your soup bowls will be about 3 inches from the heat. Ladle the soup into oven proof bowls. I've used normal bowls and gotten away with it since the time under the broiler is so brief, but don't come cryin' to me if your bowl breaks and showers your oven in shards of glass and burning onion goo.

Grab a good heavy baguette, slice some rounds .5" thick. Place baguette rounds on soup in bowls.

A brief cheese discussion. Provolone is tasty and convenient as a topping. They sell it in slices and sometimes by this point you just want to get the dish in peoples' mouths. Shredded Gruyere is my favorite but is pricey, at least in the States. It goes really well if you use the lamb broth. At home I often use a half-and-half mixture of mozzarella and Parmesan, since I always have those cheeses on hand.

Put the shredded cheese of your choice on the slice of bread in the soup, then put the prepped bowls under the broiler. Cook until the cheese is melted, then -carefully!- plate them up and serve.

At some point you should warn your guests that the bowls are burny hot.

Be warned that this is heavy duty stuff. A tiny little bowl satisfies even a hearty appetite, so making it as a starter would probably be a mistake unless you were having, I don't know, cucumbers as the main course.