Vegan French onion soup

Sure, you can avoid meat when it’s obvious, but sometimes it sneaks into a seemingly vegetarian dish. At the very top of my Who Knew There Was A Cow In There? list is French onion soup. Apparently, my cold weather favorite gets its rich, hearty flavor from beef broth. Oops.

One would assume it shouldn’t be hard to make a vegan French onion soup. The ingredients are pretty basic: yellow onions, broth and time. Lots of time.

In his cookbook Bouchon, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry infamously suggests caramelizing onions for … not 30 minutes … not 60 minutes … not even three hours. Keller wants you to bathe in onion steam for five hours. Which sounds totally insane, except I’m a working mom who will do anything for a half day of “me time.” I put together a French onion soup recipe that’s part Thomas Keller, part Famous-Barr, and part Beyoncé (She does the soundtrack for the cooking show in my mind.).

Until this project, I had no idea that I was slicing onions incorrectly. My usual way, down the middle and across the grain, yielded different sized pieces. The little ones cooked too quickly and burned. The big pieces didn’t cook enough and were tough. Instead, you can slice uniform slivers by cutting with the grain. Slice in half from root-to-tip, adjusting the angle of your knife to make radial cuts as you go. The resulting pile of perfectly proportioned onion slices filled my 3-quart Le Creuset French oven. Here’s what happened next:

1 hour: I’ve been stirring every 15 minutes, and nothing is brown yet. The onions are sweating like an old man in the steam room at the Y. I clean out my junk drawer.

2 hours: Onions are a blah shade of beige. I turn up the heat to medium. The onion steam is making my eyes water and my upper lip glisten.

2½ hours: The enamel on my pot is scorched, and the onions are starting to burn. I’ve invested 150 minutes in these babies and will not throw them away. I transfer the onions to a mixing bowl, and use a paste of water and Bar Keeper’s Friend to scrub away the charred spot. I return the onions over a lower temperature and pretend nothing has happened.

3 hours: I’m stirring constantly now, desperately avoiding another scorched incident. The onions are a viscous dark brown and will stick to the bottom of the pan if I pause for even a minute. Onions are jackasses.

3½ hours: My onions seem to be perfectly caramelized. They are tender, syrupy and a gorgeous shade of mahogany brown. I would stop here, but Thomas Keller thinks they need another hour and a half. Thomas Keller doesn’t smell like Eat-Rite Diner.

4 hours: The good news is that my onions are no longer sticking to the bottom of the pan.

4½ hours: They’re so fluffy, they’re practically ethereal. I marvel at Keller’s ability to transform a vegetable from a solid to a liquid to a gas.

5 hours: That’s not chemistry; that’s dehydration. I’ve managed to overcook the onions so badly that they are basically ash, and completely devoid of flavor. I throw them away and start over. Eating chicken would be so much easier.

I got it right the second time around – when I listened to the onions and stopped caramelizing after three and a half hours. Some vegetable broth, sherry and vinegar turned the onions into a soup. And a night in the refrigerator turned the soup into sublime.

Of course, I still had to figure out how to finish the dish. The traditional recipe suggests a baguette smothered in ooey-gooey Gruyere that is literally and figuratively over-the-top delicious, and if you’re not vegan, by all means, indulge. But if you’re watching your dairy intake, you need to meet my friend, nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast flakes are packed with B vitamins and taste cheesy, salty and a little nutty. I sprinkled some over sprouted wheat bread and broiled it for a few seconds. These vegan cheesy toasts didn’t look quite as luscious as the cheese fete in Thomas Keller’s version, but they tasted like a worthy topper for my epic onions.

What have I learned from all this? 1) Don’t even think about washing your hair before you cook onions. 2) I need to trust my intuition instead of a timer. We all do. If you think something is finished, undercooked, over salted, or in some way different than what your recipe says, then you should listen to yourself. Unless, of course, the real Thomas Keller is actually in your kitchen and tells you his secret for marathon caramelizing. Then you should definitely listen to him.