French Onion and Oxtail Soup
In which I'm almost undone by onion-inflicted inner turmoil
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The chunnel from my kitchen to French Onion and Oxtail Soup was chaotic. My first pass at this recipe took a solid two days, and when it was finally done, I served it to Cosmo. He took two bites and put down his spoon. Not a good sign.
“What’s up with you and that soup?” I asked
“Nothing, I’m not that hungry,” he said.
“Bullshit. What do you think of the soup, for real,” I said.
“It’s kind of slippery and the onions are really stringy and the bread is soggy and the cheese is wet.”
I have trained my children to dish it out, and I can take it. He was right. The soup had taken two days, and it was … fine. This is the infamous Stage Two of recipe development: heartbreak, confusion, self-doubt.
Leading up to Cosmo’s soup smackdown, I had started the recipe ideation process by unpacking my own memories of eating French onion soup as a kid. Unsurprisingly, the part that stood out was the cheesy bread. I watched a lot of French onion soup videos on YouTube to make sure I understood the brief, and decided that the one thing missing from every recipe I looked at was an explanation of how to make the beef stock they all relied on. One thing that makes me crazy is a sub-recipe. You won’t ever have to flip around in my books for the recipe on page 184 before you can start making the recipe on page 77. Calling for Beef Stock in the ingredient list of French onion soup is a particularly flagrant crime, I do declare. I would never! At least I had a hook.
From there, I sketched out a loose ingredient list and a shopping strategy. I stood in line out the door at my butcher on a 22-degree Saturday afternoon; snow was expected and everyone in front of me had decided to run out to buy a big piece of meat. I’m here working, I wanted to scream, but then I wasn’t mad anymore because the guy who helped me let me pick out the biggest oxtail bones and they also had two-pound bags of beef neck bones in the freezer section.
Day One was all about this stock. I wanted it to be full of meaty flavor and collagen, to give it that luxurious texture. And that’s how I landed on oxtails, which are to cows what chicken wings are to chickens—they contain the ideal 2:2:1 ratio of fat to cartilage to meat that makes for superb stocks.
The stock process went great, truly. Even if you don’t like French onion soup, you can get a lot of value from this recipe, I said to the imaginary audience in my head. I roasted the bones and simmered them for a full two hours before adding any carrot or onion; that way the meat flavor would be nice and developed without being clouded by the flavor of long-cooked vegetables. I used dried mushrooms and soy sauce for umami and the end result was brown-tasting in the best way. Caramelized and fortifying and mouth-filling. By making the stock a day early, it would be easy to de-fat when it was cold.
I felt excited. Now all I had to do was caramelize some onions. How hard is that??Well, that was the last bit of confidence out of me for a while. Thinly slicing 4 pounds of onions was a horrific, sulfuric assault on my eyeballs, and a time-consuming one, too. The worst part was cooking them! Sweating them, covered, until completely soft but without any color: 1 hour. Uncovering to cook off the liquid and gradually caramelize: an entire hour more, plus.
This was an issue, for sure. But I set it aside while I grated several pounds of cheese. On this point, I was clear. Gruyère alone: too sharp, potentially greasy, not cheap. For stretch, for sweetness, for exquisite meltability, it had to be mozzarella. And not fresh mozz! Low-moisture mozzarella, the kind that comes shrink-wrapped, is what gives a New York slice its signature stringy elasticity. Combining them 50/50 was a both-worlds-best approach, and the topping was good, right from the start. Sadly, this win did not make up for the onion offense, especially when I realized that the wafer-thin slices I’d cried over were the soup equivalent of angel hair pasta, and we all know how I feel about angel-hair pasta!1
I had arrived at the dreaded Stage Three: anger and despair. Lying in bed that night, Cosmo’s words ringing in my head, I knew I could not tell you to simmer stock for 4 hours and then cook onions for 2 hours. Then I started to wonder if anyone even ate French onion soup, maybe it was just something we all like talking about eating. Maybe I would have to abandon this recipe. Well wait—the stock was great. It was me v. the onions.
The next day, plenty of stock on hand, I brazenly halved the amount of onions I was calling for and cut them into thick slices. Thick! Took no time. Rather than an hour of sweating to silky, I devoted 25 minutes to floppy. An onion should be an onion, not hair. Another 15 or 20 was all that was needed for browning. Then the coupling could commence anew.
I’ll leave some surprises for the actual video. Toast was burned. Cheese had to be weighed. More stock was skimmed. My downstairs neighbors got a lot (I mean, a lot) of soup from various drafts. But you must know that another big intervention came in the form of vinegar. Sweetness, richness, umami, depth, long-cooked flavor, caramelized cheese, salt—this soup has that in spades. The most harmonious accompaniment to all that browntown is acid. Before the croutons cap the soup bowl, you must season boldly with vinegar. A dash won’t do it—there’s a literal gallon of soup involved. Dash and dash again until the palate detects zing. The zing is the thing. It’s the balance the soup needs.
The modifications made me proud of the soup, but since I had made it 4 times in 5 days, I didn’t want to look at, smell, or taste French onion soup for a while. About 10 days later, we shot the video with all the proper choices I had made along the way. That on-set bowl of soup restored me. It made me feel like a little kid in a big wooden dining chair in the tavern-style restaurant my Nana Lea used to take me to when I stayed with her. I always ordered French onion soup there, and now I can remember why.