Leave it to the French to make a glorious, silky soup from a vegetable as ordinary as an onion. But if it’s so easy to make, why are we often subjected to shoddy bowls of thin, tasteless onion-water? Or, worse, acrid burnt onion broth? Or even worse: a cloudy, oily mess? Like many straightforward dishes, the outcome relies on nailing the technique and deploying just the right ingredients. So the Epicurious Test Kitchen merged the best parts of the recipes on our site to create Our Favorite French Onion Soup.
Here’s how we cracked the code on this time-honored recipe:
Pair beef broth with white wine (and skip the flour)
Let’s start with the foundation for our soup. We’ve seen recipes that use beef broth, chicken broth, or a mix of the two. We've also seen recipes that call for red wine, white wine, or no wine at all. Our taste tests revealed the combination of an all-beef broth with white wine as the clear winner, as used in this Gourmet French Onion Soup. The beef broth (obviously home-made is best, but store-bought works too) adds an underlying richness to the soup, and we favored the lightness and acidity that white wine brings to the table.
We also tested thickening the soup with flour as well as omitting it from the recipe. We preferred the no-flour version, as used in this Bon Appétit rendition, which provides a beautiful clear broth without muddying the sweet and savory flavors of the soup.
Red wine vs white wine in French Onion Soup
Caramelize your Vidalia Onions Slowly
As we read through your comments on the French Onion Soup recipes on the site, we heard you loud and clear: “More onions!” After all, it’s not called “Broth Soup” or “Cheesy Bread Soup.” So we took a cue from another Bon Appétit recipe and upped our onion-to-broth ratio to let the main ingredient shine.
We also found many recipes that just called for “onions.” But what kind of onions make for the best soup? We tried caramelizing red, yellow, and Vidalia onions and—shocker—the sweet Vidalias came out on top. Just a sprinkle of sugar and salt (and heat) transform these sweet onions into sweet, nutty, silky strands of pure gold.
