Table of Contents
Happy Thursday everyone,
I hope that you all are doing great! It’s been a busy week of content, sick kiddo, and running around for us. But overall it has been an amazing week.
I am even getting a new knife that one of the cooking show viewers won from another amazing creator who makes knives on his channel! I am so beyond excited to get it!
I did have to move one stream because yesterday I was so grumpy that I could barely function, but luckily I got some good sleep last night and was able to get up and not be grumpy or cancel things today.
We are technically making an updated version of French Onion Soup today, but we are calling it the Existential Dread Soup because we are basing it on a chef from the game Super Animal Royale. If you go up and talk to him, he starts talking about his existential crisis and is just cutting a million onions. He ends the conversation saying, ‘It’s okay, I’ll just keep cutting my onions.’ And of course, we had to use this to create this play on French Onion Soup.
We first see what we would consider as French Onion Soup pop up during Roman times as a peasant soup. At the times onions were easy to get and very cheap, so when people had no other options for food; they would resort to making a broth out of the onions and eating this soup with crusty and cheap bread that they would either make or buy from merchants.
It was not until the 1600s that we see it travel to France and become perfected. We speak a lot of poverty food vs royalty food and during it’s migration to France, it definitely became royalty food. They added a lot of ingredients that were hard to find for people who were short on money including saffron, ginger, and even hard boiled egg yolks that were passed through a sieve at the end.
The term ‘French Onion Soup’ did not come around until the soup landed in a fine dining establishment in England in the late 1800s. They named it this way instead of it’s traditional name, soupe à l’oignon, in order to attract more customers to this exotic dish. The name stuck and followed it for the rest of it’s history.
This soup has not quite had it’s surge back to being poverty food, like a lot of dishes that we have spoken about on this blog and on the cooking show. The main factor being that a lot of eurocentric, but not French, countries have such a Francophile relationship with France, that they believe any foods coming from France are royalty food.
I did make the bone broth for our version of french onion soup and I also did go the royalty way of adding the egg yolks and ginger, but none of these things are mandatory. It is completely okay if you take the faster route by getting bone broth. If you do that, I highly suggest Fire and Kettle. I have worked with them since they first started and their bone broth has a really great flavor that is perfect for this dish.
If you do not want to spend an hour cutting onions, you can grab a mandoline or an all in one vegetable chopper; it will save your eyes and your arms.
Speaking of eyes; if you get teary-eyed while cutting onions, do NOT cut the stem, this is where most of the sulfur that hurts your eyes lives. You can stop it from really affecting you by just not cutting that part!
Existential Dread Soup
Items Needed
Chef’s knife
Large Stock Pot
Frying Pan
Sieve
Tongs
Offset Spatula
Wooden Spoon
Oven Safe Bowls
Ingredients Needed
4lbs onion; chopped
4 marrow bones
Any left over vegetable scraps
3 large carrots; chopped
8 cloves of garlic; half diced and half whole
6 tbs butter
2 tbs dried rosemary
1 tbs dried ginger
3 hard boiled egg yolks
1 cup dry white wine
½ lemon juiced
1 loaf crusty bread; chopped
8 oz parmesan; sliced
8 cups of water
Salt and Pepper
Recipe
Broth
In a large stock pan add in the marrow bones, vegetable scraps, carrots, whole garlic, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and 7 cups of water
Over a medium heat bring to simmer, drop to low and allow to reduce by half
About 30 minutes into reducing crumble in the egg yolks (if you are using premade broth add it in and boil for 15 minutes before adding your onions)
Sieve out the vegetables and marrow bones, scrape the left over marrow into the broth
Onions
In a frying or saute pan add ¼ th of the butter and put over a low-medium heat
Add onions, garlic, rosemary, ginger, and lemon juice and stir it in with an offset spatula
Keep moving it around for about 20 minutes while slowly adding in the wine and the rest of the butter and cooking off the liquid until you’re done with the wine and butter
Do the same with your last cup of water
Sprinkle in the salt and pepper and reduce down for about 15 more minutes
This whole process takes about 1-2 hours
Soup
In your large pot stir your onions with your broth and put over a medium high heat; cook together for 20 minutes
Preheat your oven on broil
Put your onion soup into oven proof bowls; add bread, then parm, and broil for 3-5 minutes or until the cheese is browned
Sprinkle with a little rosemary and a pinch of finishing salt
Don’t forget to go check out the cooking show if you want to see everything cooked live and to ask any questions! Speaking of asking questions, our discord is a great place to be if you have ANY cooking questions at all (or if you want to get me to make something for you!)
Everything that we make is thanks to the contributions of people like you who watch, read, share, like, and donate and I could not be more grateful to you!
If you love this, please subscribe to have more recipes sent to your inbox!
We will be back tomorrow talking about Korean Street Food! I am honestly so excited about this episode, not only was it delicious, it was so fun to film and to learn about!
-Momnoms
Thank you again for reading through this and I hope that you’re enjoying all of the food history that you get to learn while learning how to make the dish! This has been such a great experience for me and I feel my passion coming back to life.