Anything French Onion Soup Can Do‚ French Onion Pasta Can Do Better
Buttery caramelized onions, tender pasta, and melty cheese team up in this delicious take on the viral one-pot pasta recipe.
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00:00Food entertainment site Delish,
00:01they really just wanted to post a pretty...
00:04One, two, three, bow!
00:06Hey, everybody, welcome to Brooke's One Pot.
00:08I'm Brooke, and this is the show
00:10where I'm gonna teach you guys how to make
00:11our most popular and most delicious weeknight meals
00:14all in just one pot, one pan, or one baking sheet.
00:18And the best part of all of this
00:20is that I'm also gonna recommend a song
00:21to dance along to while you cook,
00:23a classic hit to go along with your one-pot wonder.
00:26For dinner tonight, we're getting into
00:28the pastified version of one of my favorite soups
00:31of all time, French onion soup pasta.
00:35That is a mouthful.
00:35We've got caramelized onions,
00:37perfectly cooked spirally noodles,
00:38and plenty of melty, stringy, savory Gruyere cheese.
00:42Ugh, I can't wait.
00:44This one is super simple,
00:45and there's just a few ingredients.
00:46♪♪
00:54For this recipe, you'll need a large pot
00:56or high-sided skillet, a wooden spoon,
00:58a cutting board, a knife, and a box grater.
01:01This is honestly the epitome of a low-lift recipe.
01:04French onion soup itself only has a couple of ingredients,
01:07so this pasta is gonna follow suit.
01:09Our most important ingredient, though, is, of course, onion.
01:12For French onion soup or French onion soup pasta,
01:15yellow onion is the standard.
01:17It has the right combination of sweetness and savoriness.
01:20Red onions have a little too much sugar,
01:22and then white onions have a little bit too much
01:24of that sulfuric taste to them.
01:26Yellow onions are right there in the middle.
01:28It's sort of like that bowl of forage
01:29that Goldilocks wanted to eat.
01:31This recipe calls for three large onions,
01:33but we had, like, medium-smallish ones in-house.
01:36So as long as you get to about two pounds,
01:38you should be perfect.
01:39And then when it comes to slicing your onions
01:41for being caramelized, like we're gonna do
01:43for this French onion soup pasta,
01:45you want to make sure you're slicing perpendicular
01:48to the root of the onion.
01:50That's gonna ensure that you get nice, uniform pieces
01:53that are gonna cook evenly.
01:54If you're one of those folks that is always terrified
01:57to cut onions because you're afraid
01:58of having burning, stinging, teary eyes,
02:01see if you can go for a newer onion
02:03instead of that onion that's been sitting
02:04in the back of your produce basket for a little while.
02:07Newer onions have more intact cell walls
02:09that aren't so easily ruptured when you cut into them,
02:12so it'll lessen your chances of being reduced
02:14to tears in your kitchen.
02:16The only other aromatic we have
02:17in this French onion soup pasta is garlic.
02:20We've got four good cloves here,
02:21which I'm personally a huge fan of.
02:24I don't like recipes that are like,
02:25use one clove of garlic,
02:26because like, come on, we all know we want to use four.
02:29Just gonna finely mince these four cloves of garlic.
02:32Last but not least, we've got some fresh thyme
02:35that we're adding to the soup.
02:36You could use dried thyme if that's all you have on hand,
02:38but honestly, I think fresh thyme
02:40is really what makes French onion soup what it is,
02:42and this has so few ingredients
02:44that the fresh thyme is definitely worth it.
02:46We're gonna pick a good bit of fresh thyme
02:49and then just run our knife through it really quickly.
02:51The classic cheese for French onion soup
02:53is, of course, Gruyere.
02:54Got that perfect amount of like, funky nuttiness
02:57that just plays with that sweet onion so well.
02:59If you're gonna swap anything in this recipe,
03:01please don't let it be the Gruyere.
03:03It's what makes French onion soups
03:05so warm and melty and delicious
03:08and honestly so soul-pleasing.
03:10This is a must-have.
03:11Gruyere is also personally my favorite cheese,
03:13so that might be why I'm a little bit biased.
03:17We've got a huge pan.
03:18We're gonna need the space.
03:20This is on medium heat,
03:21and I'm just gonna add a couple tablespoons of butter
03:23and let that get nice and melty.
03:25Once your butter's all nice and melted
03:27and starting to bubble,
03:28we can go ahead and add our two pounds of sliced onions.
03:31This is gonna seem like it's a lot
03:33and it's gonna seem like the pan is not big enough
03:35for this much onion,
03:36but these are gonna cook way, way, way down.
03:38Gonna take about 20 minutes for these
03:40to get to the point that we want,
03:41but I will say caramelizing onions
03:43is one of those labors of love
03:45that's truly so incredibly worth it.
03:47Please do not think this is a step you can shortcut, okay?
03:50It's gonna take you at least 20 minutes.
03:52That's like the generous estimate,
03:54and you can even take it a little bit longer if you need to,
03:56but that 20 minutes is gonna give the onions
03:58enough time to break down
03:59and to really have those sugars come out
04:01and make this what it's supposed to be.
04:03These onions are at about the halfway point
04:05in our cook time.
04:06This is really just like a sweated and browned onion,
04:08but we wanna take it to the point
04:10where the sugar starts to caramelize
04:11on the outside of the onion,
04:12which is a really deep, dark brown color.
04:15Okay, we're at about the 20-minute mark.
04:17This is what I'm talking about
04:18when I say caramelized onion.
04:20It's completely devoid of any onion-y shape.
04:23It's nice and brown,
04:24and I can even like smell the sweetness,
04:27like the little bits of sugar
04:28that have caramelized on the pan.
04:29This smells really good.
04:30Whenever I think about French onion soup in general,
04:33I think about this concoction
04:35that my father used to make me when I was sick as a kid.
04:38It was kind of like the worst version of an onion soup,
04:40and he cooked it on the stove,
04:42and it's basically like raw onions and ketchup and vinegar,
04:45even gross thinking about it,
04:46but he would make this little weird mixture for me.
04:49I would drink it,
04:50and the next day, I would feel like a new person.
04:52So the only thing that I can think of
04:54when it comes to this French onion pasta
04:56is the cure by none other than the illustrious,
05:00multi-hyphenate, just goddess of my dreams, Lady Gaga.
05:05I love you so much, girl, if you ever see this.
05:07Please come to my birthday party.
05:09The reason it makes me think of that song
05:10is because the song is basically about
05:12curing somebody with the love that you have for them,
05:15and even though I feel like
05:17that concoction my dad made for me
05:19was so incredibly disgusting,
05:21he definitely cured a lot of those ailments
05:23with the love he had for me.
05:24Now that our onions are all nice and broken down,
05:26I'm gonna go ahead and add the rest of our aromatics,
05:28and these are just gonna cook for about two minutes,
05:30just until that garlic starts to get really fragrant.
05:32If you have a gas range like we do,
05:34whenever you're adding booze to whatever you're making,
05:37whether it be wine, whether it be cognac, beer, whatever,
05:40you wanna be really mindful
05:41about the presence of that flame with alcohol.
05:44The easiest way to do this
05:45is just purely to turn your flame off.
05:47If your pan is not quite this big,
05:49you can also just remove it from the flame,
05:51and then just add your alcohol
05:53without that giant dangerous flame beneath it.
05:55It couldn't hurt to have an extra layer of safety.
05:57Once the wine has already helped you
05:59deglaze the bottom of the pan,
06:00you're gonna wanna let it evaporate almost completely,
06:03and for this kind of recipe,
06:04you wanna pick a dry white wine
06:06as opposed to a sweet white wine.
06:07You've got enough sweetness already from the onions,
06:09so you're gonna need something to balance that out.
06:10This smells so good.
06:13This smells so good.
06:14Time to start building the base of the broth
06:17that we're going to use to cook the noodles.
06:20One of the things I love about this recipe
06:22is that the noodles cook in the sauce that they get served in
06:25so the noodles have a chance to release their starch
06:27into the sauce and help it thicken naturally.
06:30I'm also gonna go in with a few cups of beef broth
06:33to give the noodles something to boil in,
06:35but also because beef broth
06:36is one of the traditional ingredients
06:38for a French onion soup.
06:39If you wanna keep this totally vegetarian or vegan,
06:43you could use a regular vegetable stock
06:44and that's totally fine.
06:45We're gonna use the entire carton, which is four cups,
06:48and there's also a cup of water in here
06:50just to make sure we have enough liquid volume
06:52to cook all of our noodles.
06:53Then last but not least,
06:54we're gonna go in with our cavatappi.
06:57I love cavatappi in general.
06:58It's kind of my go-to short pasta.
07:00So all those spirals and ridges
07:02are perfect sauce-catching vehicles.
07:05I'm gonna go ahead and hit this
07:06with a generous pinch of salt
07:08and some freshly ground black pepper.
07:10We're gonna let this come to a boil
07:11and then you want the noodles to cook
07:13to your desired level of doneness,
07:16which in my opinion is maybe a minute or two
07:18past what it says on the box.
07:19We're also looking for this to be enough liquid
07:22to help the cheese melt,
07:23but we don't want it to be like soup.
07:24So you definitely want this liquid to reduce quite a bit.
07:26This sauce has gotten nice and thick
07:28from all that starch that the pasta released
07:31and it's almost ready to add the cheese,
07:33but first I just wanna try one of these noodles.
07:35Oh yeah, okay, that'll do.
07:39I'm gonna go ahead and kill the heat
07:40just because I don't want this liquid to evaporate anymore.
07:43But as you can see,
07:44there's still a good bit of liquid in here,
07:46but it's gotten thick enough
07:47so that it'll start coating the noodles
07:49instead of just sitting at the bottom of the pan.
07:51Gonna add my Gruyere in
07:53and then we're just gonna fold that into the noodles
07:55in the sauce until everything is all nice
07:57and creamy and homogenous.
07:59This is having sort of like a macaroni effect going on here.
08:02The more you stir, the more the cheese will melt,
08:05the thicker it'll get,
08:06and then as soon as everything's all melty,
08:08it'll be the perfect consistency.
08:10I am thoroughly excited.
08:12This is like the grown and sexy version
08:14of macaroni and cheese
08:16that you can eat on a weeknight
08:17and still feel like an adult.
08:29And it's time for a bite.
08:31Oh my goodness.
08:32I'm gonna try to take a bite of this
08:33without having cheese all over my chin,
08:36but if I can't succeed, please don't laugh at me.
08:41It's in.
08:42This is like French onion soup grew up
08:45and got a really, really well-paying job.
08:47This is so freaking delicious.
08:49I'm telling you, cooking the noodles in the sauce
08:52gave the chance for the perfect level of creaminess
08:55without having to add any cream at all.
08:57Oh my God, and who can get enough
08:58of these stringy, cheesy bits?
09:02This is amazing.
09:03But honestly, even with all the cheese
09:05and the perfectly cooked pasta and this creamy sauce,
09:07the star of the show is still the onion.
09:09That sweetness is coming through loud and clear,
09:12but not in an overwhelming way.
09:14This is 10 out of 10 for me.
09:15I'm gonna go ahead and eat this while it's hot
09:17because I don't want to disrespect this bowl of pasta,
09:19but as soon as I'm done with that,
09:21I'm gonna hit these dishes.
09:22Unfortunately, I've got a few cheesy bits stuck
09:24to this pan, but you know what I'm not gonna do
09:26is let this thing soak.
09:28Soaking is completely lazy and completely unnecessary.
09:32It's bad for your pans, it's a bacteria breeding ground,
09:35and it'll make your roommates hate you.
09:36And it's just bad feng shui, bad home ownership, all bad.
09:40All you should need to get any pan clean
09:42is the right soap, the right sponge,
09:44and a little bit of elbow grease.
09:47Don't be afraid of it.
09:48I told you guys this would be the epitome
09:49of a low-lift dish, and I feel like I delivered on that.
09:53Honestly, we only used a couple of ingredients
09:55and the dishes were so minimal.
09:57This is easily something you can add
09:58to your weeknight rotation and feel really good about it.
10:01If you've been around Delish for a while,
10:03you know we love French onioning anything.
10:05So if you want more French onion recipes,
10:07keep it right here at delish.com.