How To Make the Paula Deen French Onion Soup Recipe at Home

French onion soup is one of those simple classic recipes that came out of a basic need to feed someone when the cupboard was bare. Onion soups have been popular food since Roman times, as onions are easy to grow. With plentiful yield and decent nutritional content, even in poor soil, an onion soup can feed people when there is nothing else in the cupboard.

French Onion soup introduces caramelization to the classic onion soup formula, giving the onions a richer, sweeter and more developed flavor before introducing them to the broth. Broth can be beef or chicken if preferred, but a simple broth that begins with onions in water is the basis of all onion soups, including French Onion soup.

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Paula Deen French Onion Soup Recipe

This French onion soup recipe was created and presented by TV personality and restauranteur Paula Deen. Despite some self-inflicted damage to her brand in the early 2010s, Deen’s restaurant business has been consistent since that time, and her national brand has largely recovered. Deen publishes her cookbooks through Hachette Client Services, a branch of the Hachette Book Group, the third largest publishing company in the world.

Paula’s French Onion soup uses olive oil as its primary fat in the sauteeing of the onions. This version of the recipe restores butter to pride of place, but it’s still perfectly acceptable to follow Paula Deen’s version of the recipe, as that’s the authentic version of this creator.

Ingredients

1/3 cup butter (or olive oil, or a combination of both)
8 sliced onions
2 cloves minced garlic
2 tablespoons flour
8 cups beef stock
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 loaf French bread (baguette or demi-baguette)
2 cups grated Gruyere cheese

Directions

Heat up the beef broth to begin the process, stirring in the white wine. Beef broth can be kept at a simmer indefinitely, making it an easy first step for when it’s needed.
Peel the onions, cutting them into slices. Using olive oil or butter, saute them until they begin to caramelize, adding the garlic once the onions have started to turn a dark golden color.
Once the onions are caramelized, springle the flour over them and cook until a dark-blonde to red roux has been made around the onions.
Add the white wine and stock mixture to the onions, stirring them into the onions in small batches. The first shots of the liquid will mostly evaporate but also absorb into the flour, once the flour is fully hydrated, the broth will start to emerge from the stock, onions and roux. Bring the soup to a boil, adding thyme and bay leaf.
Bring the soup down to a simmer, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes or so. Taste, then add salt and pepper as needed.
Slice the baguette into 3/4” slices and butter on both sides. On a griddle or cast-iron skillet, toast each slice. If you are

FAQs

Who Is Paula Deen?

Paula Ann Hiers Deen is a restauranteur and TV celebrity chef who begin presenting on Food Network with Paula’s Home Cooking in 2002. After her 2013 controversy, she switched to syndication and streaming distribution, with her most recent shows being Positively Paula and Paula Deen’s Sweet Home Savannah.

As the title of the latter show indicates, Deen lives in Savanna, Georgia and has been a Savannah resident her entire life. She has been a restaurateur since her divorce from her first husband, Jimmy Deen, in 1989, and runs her businesses with her sons Jamie and Bobby.

Where Are Paula Deen’s Restaurants?

Deen’s main restaurants are The Lady and Sons Restaurant and Paula Deen’s Creek House, both in Savannah, Georgia. She also has a six-location chain of Paula Deen’s Family Kitchen restaurants with two locations in Tennessee (Pigeon Forge and Nashville), one in Branson, Missouri, one in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, one in Foley, Alabama and one in Panama City Beach, Florida. All of her restaurants follow her original recipes that were established by The Lady Restaurant, which was the restaurant later refined as The Lady and Sons when her sons entered the business with her.

How was French Onion soup invented?

The traditional story about the origin of French Onion soup, a rich variation on a food eaten by the poor since Roman times, is that it was made for King Louis XV after coming home from an unsuccessful day of hunting to a bare cupboard at his favorite hunting lodge. He took some beef stock that had already been prepared, combined it with the onions in the lodge that he caramelized, and ate it with a blanket of gruyere cheese topped with a crouton of toasted baguette.

A more likely story is that the king’s uncle, Stanislas Leszczynski, Duke of Lorraine, had his chef produce a version of a peasant food for the king after tasting it in an in in Champagne. The Duke popularized the recipe at the Palace of Versalles, but it became a popular dish for the common people in the 19^th Century in the famous open-air Parisian market Les Halles.

What Is Les Halles?

Les Halles was the original central fresh food market in Paris. Like so many European shopping districts, Les Halles was one of the central shopping arcades of Paris, starting in the region of Champeaux in the northern part of Paris in the 11^th Century. After centuries of ups and downs, the market would gain a permanent home as a world-famous semi-outdoor shopping arcade designed by Victor Baltard in 1850.

As a center of Paris’s working life, Les Halles was a meeting point for all Parisian working people, from the poorest of the poor to bureaucrats in the world of the rich and powerful.

The building of Les Halles endured for nearly a century and a quarter before being closed for business for good at the end of the working day on January 12, 1973. By the end of 1979, the modern Forum Des Halles had been built to replace the original Les Halles, and it is the modern Forum, still known to the people as Les Halles, that still survives today.

The modern market of Les Halles is an outdoor shopping mall that welcomes 150,000 visitors daily. This visiting number makes it nearly 1.5 times as busy on a yearly average basis as the Mall of America, the Bloomington, Minnesota indoor shopping mall that boasts of attracting 40 million visitors on an annual basis, or roughly 110,000 per day. The latter’s “West Market” shopping area was modeled after European shopping arcades like Les Halles.

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How To Make the Paula Deen French Onion Soup Recipe at Home

Paula Deen French Onion Soup Recipe

Ingredients

Directions