Bonjour, as the authors of our today's exercise say!
Remember the dialogue between De'Briglia and Anastasia from the movie «Forward Midshipmen»?
“The Russians just want to fill their bellies.” What does the poor Russian peasant eat: this terrible black bread, this terrible porridge, this terrible cabbage…
— As for you, the French, they say your favorite dish is frogs and onion soup — one onion per bucket of water.
So, today I’ll tell you how I stepped over myself and decided to make a soup in which, contrary to Yaguzhinskaya’s words, there is not one onion per bucket, but much more. The heroism lies in the fact that I really don’t like boiled onions in soup. Sauteed or fried — please, but if you come across flaccid translucent fibers… In general, beeeee.
One day we wandered into a small restaurant on Tsvetnoy Boulevard and there was onion soup in pots on the menu. The restaurant was distinguished by good cuisine and someone took this masterpiece for a sample, and I dipped my sting into it to try what it was. I avoided onions in every possible way, showing miracles of balance, but the taste of the soup itself seemed very, very interesting to me. In addition, each pot was topped with a piece of baguette and sprinkled with baked cheese, which also added charm to this work of culinary art.
Subsequently, this restaurant closed, I could not find a similar dish anywhere, the sensations themselves were somehow dulled and everything was ready to sink into the abyss of memory, where I could curl up and happily rest in the bose, when recently, on the Internet, I came across a recipe for onion soup, in pots and with a baguette baked with cheese.
In general, meet — onion soup with cheese.
We will need:
- Chicken
- White onion
- Flour
- Gruyère cheese
- Dry white wine
- Butter
- Garlic
- Baguette
- Salt
For one and a half liters of soup everything is in the following quantities:
Now let's talk more about the ingredients. As you can see, there are a lot of onions here — about a kilogram. They say you can use sweet red onions, but we decided to stick with the traditional recipe.
Same story with cheese. Here you need Gruyere, which, by the way, costs more than a thousand per kilo, but it feels like you can use some other hard cheese like Parmesan or even Cheddar (see Schwerin cheese soup). Although, naturally, the taste of the soup will change. With Parmesan, I think it will be sharper, since Gruyère has a rather mild taste. However, this time we decided not to experiment with cheese, as well as with onions, but stick to the source. Moreover, those 150 grams that are needed for our dish are not so expensive)))
Okay, let's get to the point. We cut our half of the chicken into small pieces and put it in a saucepan with one and a half liters of water to cook until it becomes a strong broth (about an hour and a half).
Thinly slice the onion into half rings. Indeed, subtly:
This is the amount we got:
Kr-beauty:
Three of our Gruyères on a fine grater:
Take a thick-bottomed pan or, as in my case, a cast-iron cauldron, and melt the butter:
Pour in all the onions, cover with a lid and simmer for half an hour, stirring occasionally:
Here's what happened:
Crush the garlic, pour in the flour:
Stir and add wine. Stir again, bring to a boil and cook for five minutes:
After this, pour in our strained chicken broth without meat (we use the chicken itself for something else) and bring to a boil:
Pour 80% of all the cheese into the boiling soup and stir until it dissolves, taste, add salt:
Now preheat the oven to 200°C and pour the soup into serving bowls. The original had clay pots, but here at the dacha we found only Ikea bowls. We put a piece of baguette in each, sprinkle all the splendor with the remaining cheese and put it in the oven for about fifteen minutes:
After this time, the cheese has melted, or even better, if it has browned, you can eat it. Bon appetit!
Overall, what can I say… The soup is actually absolutely amazing. Everyone in my household praised him for his sweet soul, and even the strict experts in the person of the neighbor’s daughter, who couldn’t stand onions, approved of him. The onions here acquire the consistency of cabbage, do not disperse into the jelly and are indeed very tasty. By the way, if you don’t know that it’s an onion, you’ll never be able to tell.
