December 28, 2024
Quite a big day in the kitchen. We found a French Onion Soup recipe that we had to try out and we had an idea to improve our raspberry sorbet. We didn’t document the French Onion Soup because we were pretty skeptical, but it turned out to be the best we’d ever made! It uses a slow cooker to caramelize the onions. Apple News knows that Bill likes to see recipes, so it served up this one from https://www.southernliving.com/recipes/slow-cooker-french-onion-soup. Six to seven hours in the slow cooker sounded pretty extreme but it worked!!
It was astoundingly easy, too. Slice up two pounds of sweet onions. Dump them in the slow cooker, melt a stick of butter (1/4 pound), put 1 1/2 tsp of sugar, 1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt and 1/2 tsp of black pepper in the butter so it’s automatically well distributed and pour over the onions.
Put 6 thyme sprigs tied with kitchen twine and a bay leaf on top and let it simmer in the slow cooker on high for 6 - 7 hours.
Add 5 cups of low salt beef broth and 1 Tbsp. of sherry vinegar and let it simmer another 1/2 hour or so in the slow cooker.
That’s it! The onion soup is done. We then made up the cheesy bread with fresh chopped thyme and served it on the side.
The mise en place for the raspberry sorbet. That’s right, there are only four ingredients, raspberries, raspberry liqueur, lemon juice and sugar. We just got the new raspberry liqueur from di Amore and that’s part of what made this batch of sorbet so good. This stuff is RASPBERRIES and then MORE RASPBERRIES!! These liqueurs don’t have a really long shelf life, so this being fresh helped.
Here’s the new idea for the sorbet, don’t use a blender, it produces too many raspberry seed bits. The Chinoise didn’t work, it is simply too fine and delicate for this job. We ended up using the China Cap and ended up with a little less pureé than we normally would from about 6 cups of berries, but it worked, amazingly smooth sorbet!
A certain parrot is addicted to chocolate cream…
The French Onion Soup and Cheesy Bread with KALTBACH Le Gruyère AOP cheese melted under the broiler and fresh chopped thyme sprinkled on as it came out of the oven. The soup was the best we’d ever made and it was almost effortless as well - win win!
The champagne was Étoile Rosé (french for Star) from Chandon and it contrasted perfectly.
The Kaltbach is a very good Gruyére indeed and the parrot approves!
The raspberry sorbet. The new process, even though it reduces the yield and takes a bit more work is definitely worth it.
We were wondering if Bill would ever get a bit of sorbet…