French Onion Soup

The rain started today.  Six full days of heavy rain are expected, perfect soup crock weather. In omnivore times, this Vegetarian Slow Cooker made French Onion Soup on a near weekly basis.  It always started with the prior night's crock pot roast juices.  Creating a fabulous French Onion Soup without an animal base has been a challenge.  A small batch was tried last week, using crock Vegetable Stock as the broth component. It was way too sweet and did not have the intense rich flavor of an animal stock.  Today another attempt was made using Vegetable Better than Bouillon and some soy sauce as the broth base.  Do not be intimidated by the length of the instructions below.  This has got to be one of the easiest things to make in a crock.  It is very forgiving.  Start the onions the night before or in the morning.  Even letting the onions sit in the unplugged crock for a few hours or overnight in the fridge won't hurt it.

Most of French Onion Soup fun is the wondrous crusty melty cheese top.  The weekend at Uncle Meat & Potatoes and Auntie EQ's was perfect for taking advantage of their working oven. If you don't have a broiler or oven to finish off the crusted cheese top, add the cheese to the bottom of the bowl, then the crouton, and ladle steaming hot soup on top.   It won't look as spectacular, but it's still a good eat.

Winner, Loser or Meh

This was very good.  Good enough to write and post about. We had it for a late lunch and everyone ate it all up very quickly with little conversation until their individual two cup soup crocks were empty. My only complaint is that the Vegetable Better than Bouillon has an intense celery seed like flavor and I was not thrilled to end on those bitter notes. It was, however, infinitely better then the version last week.  Any readers who know of a drop dead wonderful substitute for beef broth in vegetarian cooking, please pass on your finds.  I'd love to try them. 

Recipe

I used a 6 quart crock for this

Ingredients:

See and use Caramelized Onion recipe for the base.  The following amounts for this batch of onion base was cooked overnight on low until it reached the color in the picture below:

• 3 Tbls butter
• 5 large onions, peeled, thinly sliced
• 5 cloves of garlic, peeled, minced

After the Caramelized Onion base has finished, add to the crock the ingredients below. Cover and cook on high for about on hour:

• 1 Tbls soy sauce
• 6 cups vegetable broth (Vegetable Better than Boullion and water)
  
• 1 1/2 tsp fresh thyme, chopped or 1/2 tsp dried thyme

After this has enough time to get simmering hot, add:

• 1/3 cup dry sherry
• pepper to taste

Cook the soup covered while the broiler is started, and the below items prepared:

• 3/4 pound Gruyere cheese, grated
• 6 slices crusty french bread or 12 large garlic croutons made from single slices of baguette 

Ladle soup into oven safe bowls.  Top with bread slice to fit or two croutons to fit.  Cover with 1/6 the cheese.  Place all bowls on a cookie sheet and place under broiler until the top is brown and melted.  Remove tray from the broiler and using oven mitt place each bowl on a room temperature plate. Serve immediately.