It felt strangely satisfying to be smelling onions on my fingers and crockery clanging again after quite a while.  Well, this monster called Work has been preventing me from getting any serious cooking done; apart from throwing ingredients between bread.  This time round, the dish in question is French Onion Soup.  Why French onion soup? Because PY wanted French onion soup; which is as good a reason as any these days.  Plus, we tried the french onions soups at Vivocity's The Mussel Guys and Phin's Steakhouse at Tampines Mall which were just drab.  So I brought out my trusty Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes - yes, the one where every receipe for the dishes featured have been tested and evaluated by America's Test Kitchen.  So essentially, its a 'How to make the perfect ..." type of cookbook.  I decided to make French onion soup from scratch starting with a good'ole fashion beef stock.

Beef stocks are funny things: why is it that Maggi or Knorr stock cubes have lots of flavous except beef?  Or why is it that instant noodles usually have chicken seasoning rather than beef?  Well, according to Cook's Illustrated, weight for weight, chicken releases more flavour from its meat, bones and skin into liquid than beef does.  Hence, to obtain some serious beef stock, a whole lot of meat is required.  And precisely lots of meat is what is required for the rich beef stock recipe found in the Best Recipes book.

Here's the recipe:

1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil

6 pounds beef shank, meat cut from bones in large chunks or 4 pounds chuck and 2 pounds small marrow bones

1 large onion, halved

0.5 cup dry red wine

1 litre boiling water

0.5 teaspoons salt

-Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat.  Brow meat and oniion on all sides.  Don't overcrowd and add more oil if necessary.

-Remove contents and add the wine and reduce till a brown syrup.  Return the meat and bones.  Reduce heat and sweat the meat and onions until a thick brown intensely flavoured liquid is formed, about 20mins.

-Increase the heat to medium high, add water and salt and let simmer, partially ocvered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Then strain the contents and tada! 2 litres of ones of the best beef stock ever.  The patient people at America's Test Kitchen found that the traditional method of roasting vegetables for stocks did not really add much flavour; a simple onion did the trick.

 And for the soup:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

5 medium red onions (3 pounds).  Sliced thin.

2 litres beef stock from above

0.25 cup dry red wine

2 sprigs fresh parsley

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Ground black pepper

Salt

-Melt butter in a large tockpot over medium-high heat.  Add the onions and a sprinkle of salt and stir the onions until thoroughly caramelised to a brown syrup.  30 to 35 mins

-Stir in the beef stock, red wine, parsley, thyme and bay leaf.  Loosen the bits at the bottom.

-Simmer to blend the flavours.  About 20mins.  Then discard the herbs (except onions). Stir in the vinegar and adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

For the top crusts

1 baguette, cut into 1cm slices

4.5 ounces swiss cheese, sliced.

3 ounces Asiago cheese, freshly grated (about 1.5 cups)

-Adjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position; heat the broiler.  Set heat-safe bowls or crocks on a baking sheet.  fill each with about 1.5 cups soup.  Top each bowl with 2 bread slices and then the Swiss and Asiago cheeses.  

-Broil till browned and bubbly, about 10mins.

The book also states that you can replace the beef stock (if you have no time to tediously make some
) with off-the-shelf 6 cups of low-sodium chix broth and 1.75 cups of low sodium beef broth.  No doubt about it, the combination of cheeses was found to be the best by the test kitchen.  And red onions gave the best flavour too.

What I did below was to put the bread and the cheese in to a soup pot and just baked the whole thing as I didn't have oven safe bowls.  I used a single layer of country bread, Swiss Emmental (not the same as Swiss cheese!) and mozarella as Asiago was impossible to find.  One mistake I had made was to let too much water evaporate (too focused on getting a nice, rich stock) that I ended up with a cross between a soup and a stew.  Don't be afraid to add water to your beef stock or onion soup.

So with the leftover meat from making the beef stock, I made some sandwiches from the leftover bread.  I shredded the meat, topped it with some gherkins and dijonnaise and, of course, any leftover cheese and voila! there you have it, a full course meal fro ma few simple ingredients.  But all of these took quite a lot of time though, two plus hours, if you're not an experienced cook.  But then good food, good fun, nothing really more I can ask for!