Onion Soup With Fontina

Onion Soup With Fontina One lesson I learned as a personal chef is that good food doesn’t have to be complicated. My clients loved my Italian-flavored onion soup and it couldn’t be easier to make. Sauté onions and olive oil then simmer them with thyme and broth. Serve with melted cheese on top and that’s it. Onion soup with thyme and fontina always hits the spot. The first thing I want to do for my onion soup is sauté my onions. And I love using sweet onions. They just have more sugar in them which makes a really good onion soup. And I've always adored French onion soup so this is kind of my Italian take on it. I like a little texture on my onion soup so I just slice the onions. Just cut them in half and then just go ahead and slice them, perfect. Before I add the onions, I just want to add a little bit of olive oil to my pan that I've already started heating at about medium heat. You don’t want to cook onions on too high heat because you don’t want to burn them. You want to slowly soften them. And although sometimes it looks like a lot of onions, they actually cook down and all of the natural water sort of evaporates and so you don’t end up with very much. Salt and pepper. The salt will sort of bring out the natural moisture in the onion and little pepper for flavor. The onions are going to take 10 minutes to cook so in the meantime, I’m going to chop my thyme and measure my beef broth. The onions look so good. They’ve been sautéing for 10 minutes. They're slowly softening. So now it’s time to add a teaspoon of chopped thyme and four cups of beef broth. The onions have been simmering in rich beef broth and thyme for about 15 minutes. And boy oh boy, does it smell good? Alright, let that sit for a minute and just prepare the rest of my ingredients. Now I'm using ciabatta bread. I love it because it’s kind of — it has a really thin crust. It’s crunchy on the outside but it has these big air pockets on the inside so it makes it really light. So let’s cut a few slices of that and then just cut it in half again and cut into cubes just like that, nice and big. There we go. Alright, so we’ve got the bread. Now obviously, you know, French onion soup, it’s known for the melting bubbly cheese on top. So we’re going to use fontina cheese. It’s grassy and fruity. But believe it or not, it’s also got a little kick to it which I love. But what's even better is it melts beautifully. I mean you stick under the broiler and it just, it’s so buttery and creamy that it just melts unbelievably well. And I also want to cut the ends off of it. So now, tantalize some of the onion soup into our bowls. See the onions are nice and tender. That’s smells so good. And then we put it right here and then you just add some bread and top it with the cheese. And then you stick it on the broiler and slowly starts to melt and crawls over the edges. So delicious.