Saturday Night: French Onion Soup

Last week Karen got me thinking about making french onion soup. Since there was time yesterday to do it properly, I made a pot for dinner.

Because onion soup needs a good stock, I started off by making a batch of "jus roti" (dark chicken stock) derived from the recipe in FSToS:

2 pounds chicken wings, cut into segments
2 chicken backs, cut into pieces
6 cups water
1 stalk celery, large dice
1 carrot, large dice
4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1/2 onion, coarsely chopped
4 sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
~ 1 tsp black pepper corns
salt to taste
EV olive oil

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Add a couple Tbs of olive oil to a roasting pan and dredge the chicken pieces in it. Place the pan as close to the bottom of the oven as possible and lay a piece of foil over the top (to prevent oil from splattering all over the inside of the oven and making a big smoky mess). Roast for about 30 minutes, turning occasionally, until the chicken pieces are nicely browned. Add the onion, celerly, carrot, and garlic and continue to roast for another 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Remove the pan from the oven and transfer as much of the contents as possible to a stock pot. Add a cup or so of water to the roasting pan and stir over heat to deglaze. Transfer this to the stock pot. Add the remaining ingredients to the stock pot, cover, and place over medium-low heat. Allow the stock to simmer for an hour or so, then strain it, allow it to cool, and skim the fat.

The resulting stock should be quite dark and nicely gelatinous when cooled.


For the soup itself, I used this stock and followed the recipe in Bourdain, though I doubled the suggested amounts of balsamic vinegar and port. The results were very, very good. Combined with the ravioli (see next post), both Andrea and I ended up very happy at the end of the meal. :-)